Spirits inhabited the same world as the people who lived in it. Not a world apart from the domestic one but the same world, seen from the corner of your eye as you crossed the fields in the dark or walked home along a mountain path after the summer light had finally gone. The mooinjer veggey were the little people, living under the hills. The phynnodderee was a fallen fairy who helped with the harvest. The buggane was malevolent and site-specific. And over all of them — over the Island itself — stood Manannán mac Lir, the old god of the sea, whose cloak of mist hid the Island from invaders and whose rent in rushes is still carried to the summit of South Barrule at Midsummer.

What made the Manx supernatural world distinctive was not its existence but its completeness, its persistence, and the depth to which it penetrated every layer of the Island’s life. The keeills were in the ground. The wells were in the fields. The spirits were in the hills and the glens and the ruined churches. Christianity did not try to replace any of it. It settled alongside, and the two traditions divided the territory between them. A man who understood both could navigate between them — as Timothy the tailor did, stitching his breeches while the buggane rose before him, leaping to consecrated ground at the last stitch.

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The story of the Isle of Man is told across people, places, trade, law, and culture. Every path leads somewhere new.