[from W Ralph Hall Caine Isle of Man]

CHAPTER I.

Beg Mac-y-Leirr, or Little Mannanan, Son of the Sea

.

Mannanan had wonderful powers of magic, rather than great physical strength. He could cover the sea with a dense white fog, or he could call down from the hills a purple haze, and thus hide his dear little land from view. If robbers persisted and penetrated this mist, he could set a man on a hill and ' you'd think there were a hundred there.'

We still live under the protection of Mannanan, and no better testimony to our gratitude and admiration could be offered than is contained in one fact-our island continues to bear his name.

If the reader has misgivings regarding any of these stories, I can assure him that much of our so-called history-set out in solemn tomes, and at unconscionable length-rests on no less slender basis. Mystery and uncertainty seem to creep into every statement. Reverently brushing aside all idle tales of mighty and crafty magicians, I am confronted at the very outset with an inherited suspicion: Was Mann always an island?

There is, of course, hardly any doubt that at one period our island, like all the surrounding ones, was once a part of the European continent.

Otherwise we could not account for evidences of animal life long since extinct found within our little sea-girt land.

Among the innumerable traditions of St. Patrick with which the island abounds-all of them apocryphal, and, for the most part, fitting legacies of the dark age to which they belong-we have one by which it is made to appear that St. Patrick came over to us on horseback.

I don't believe a word of it. But my incredulity has no reference to any supposed physical obstacle to such a journey. Probably the only basis of the story lies in the conviction that, at some remote period, a visitor from Ireland could reach our shores in some such way, incurring no impossible risks, fording streams, swimming the rivers.

As a boy I remember my father recounting a strange tale of a great inland sea in the northern half of the island, and recalling the tradition that the land once stretched out from Ayre northwards until it reached the Scottish coast.

It so happens that an old prophecy declared that the Manx and the Scot would one day come so close that each would throw his mallet at the other. As a saying, the prophecy illustrates the animosity subsisting in the minds of the two peoples, an animosity too deep to be dispelled by any proximity in a mere geographical sense. As a prophecy regarding the changing conditions of land and sea, it is rapidly attaining more success than is usual with most prophecy. The island grows towards Scotland, and Scotland grows towards the island, the sea between showing a tendency to silt.

With one exception, every map I have ever seen or heard of gives Man as an island, and shows at every point of the coast-line a margin of blue sea sufficient to make invasion at any period of modern history a responsible, if not exactly a hazardous, undertaking.

Certain old maps, of which John Speed's of 1610 (somewhere described, wrongfully, though it bears both names and both dates, as Durham's of 1595) may be cited as an example, show the Mull of Galloway a long way south, nearly halfway down our western coast-line.

Only one map shows any link. This is found in the Vatican in Rome, and privileged visitors interested in the Isle of Man, and recalling the close touch the Sovereign Pontiff kept with our land in pre-Reformation times, will note it with a strange misgiving of historic data.

The Vatican map may be of no more value than ån intelligent guess at the conditions of the past, but the great inland sea which quickened my youthful fancy was no old wife's tale. Five or six centuries ago there were not fewer than three, four, or five lakes in the low-lying land of the Curragh, some or all of which received the always abundant waters of the Sulby.

The largest was of sufficient consequence to be included in a grant to the Bishop. His lordship, in characteristic vein, with an eye in this instance to the fishes rather than the loaves, obtained by this grant, made as late as 1505, the right to one half of the fishing in what is described in the map published about a century later as Malar Lough, a sheet of water a mile in length and three-eighths of a mile in breadth, and situated between Lezayre and Ramsey, land now known as Lough Mollo.

The Sulby now empties itself into Ramsey Bay on the east, near to a point at which there was until late in the nineteenth century a considerable stretch of bog-land, often flooded by the sea, and called the Mooragh. The natural flow of the waters, however, would be directly towards the sea at Jurby, either to the north or north-west. The Lhane Valley, directly in front of the waters as they come down from the hills, seems to have been made by a rich and abundant stream. There may have been some prehistoric division, and geological investigation shows that a considerable stream did, as a matter of fact, flow through this valley northwards to the sea.

Probably the Sulby was in former times a more considerable stream than it is to-day, and lived up to its most unkind reputation in later history by occasionally overflowing its banks, joining lake to lake, and forming a great inland sea. In that event the stream would have on its westward course a journey to the sea longer by a mile, or even two miles, than is apparent to-day, the slow processes of erosion accounting for a loss of territory to this extent along the whole of the coast-line of Jurby, Ballaugh, and Kirk Michael.

Otherwise the island stands everywhere like an impregnable rock against the buffetings of the waves.