“You must go to the Isle of Man.”
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| Mountain Road, Isle of Man |
This was the advice I was given during a
university lecture on European History 400-1200. The lecturer in question was
five feet nothing tall with a will of iron and you disobeyed her at your peril.
I duly entered the island on my mental list of places to go.
I have to admit that it has taken a
while. That lecture is nearly (cough)
thirty years ago now, and I can’t remember anything else about it, except that
early medieval trading sites are called emporia and that Visby might have been
mentioned. I’ve ticked off a lot of places that were higher on my list: Crete
in springtime, Albania, Khiva and Kashgar, whilst the Isle of Man has remained in
a mid-table position. But when I discovered that my husband Neil also had a reason
or two for wanting to pay a visit to the island and that BA operated flights
from London City airport, it was time to get on with it.
The original plan had been to use public
transport to get around, but we had second thoughts and hired a car. Despite
the car in question being a hideous diesel powered Nissan with a baffling
keyless entry system, this proved to be a good decision, as it enabled us to
see a lot more with our two full and one half days.
We arrived on a Friday evening and checked
in to our B&B in Douglas, where we were greeted by Victoria Wood. It may
not have been the real Victoria Wood, but it was an excellent imitation. It was slightly disappointing to find that
the waitress who served our breakfast the following morning was not in the
least like Julie Walters.
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| Laxey Wheel |
Fortified with some Manx kippers, we set
off up the scenic coastal road to Laxey.
Laxey was a quiet hamlet until lead mining in the area started in the
1790s. The local mining industry underwent rapid expansion after the formation in
the 1840s of the Great Laxey Mining Company. The Laxey Wheel, also known as
Lady Isabella, was used to pump water out the mine, but it is more than just a
piece of industrial heritage. This
bright red wheel bearing the three-legged emblem of the Isle of Man occupies a
beautiful setting in the Glen Mooar valley, and was a tourist attraction even
when the mining activity was in full swing. Summer visitors were keen to see
and climb the wheel, and enterprising local residents opened pavement cafes to
supply them with refreshments. Today there are trails around the mining
complex, with information boards about the industrial heritage and the local
flora and fauna.
Further up the coast is the town of Ramsey,
rather smaller and quieter than Douglas.
Before exploring the town we visited the nearby Milntown estate, which
was originally the home of the Christian family (Fletcher Christian of the
mutiny on The Bounty was a relation). The Christians reached the peak of their power and influence in the
seventeenth century when William Christian (1608-1663, popularly known as
Illiam Dhone) became Governor General, but after the Restoration, he was executed
as a traitor for having surrendered the island to the Parliamentary forces
during the Civil War.
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| Milntown |
For
the next 150 years the family kept a low profile, living on their other estate
in Cumbria and it was not until 1830 that John Christian returned to enlarge
and refurbish Milntown. His improvements included the ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’
look that that the house has to this day. In 1886, the last of the Christian
family to own Milntown, William Bell Christian, died bankrupt. The estate was variously used a school and a hotel, until in the
1960s it was bought by Lady Valerie Edwards, the widow of a steel magnate from
Swansea and her son, Sir Clive. Sir Clive bequeathed the house and gardens to
the Manx nation in 1999 and the property is now run by a charitable trust.
The fifteen acres of gardens are probably
the main attraction for visitors, though the café/restaurant, which uses
produce from the Milntown kitchen garden is worth a visit in its own right, and
is open throughout the year, even when the gardens are closed.
We also took a tour of the house, which was
a rather strange experience. Sir Clive and his business partner Bob Thomas had
been very interested in cars and motorbikes, to the extent that the tour guide
described Sir Clive as the Jeremy Clarkson of his day. On closer inspection the
leather-bound volumes filling the fumed oak bookcases in the library turned out
to be bound copies of Autocar magazine.
Much of the furniture in the house was brought from Lady Valerie’s
former marital home in Swansea, including a very elaborate dressing table,
which had been her wedding present from her husband. It seemed slightly odd to be shown 1960s
bathrooms as part of a guided tour. These were the sort of bathrooms I
remembered from childhood, if rather more lavish. The tour lasted an hour and a
half, probably half an hour longer than necessary, because the guide kept
relating rather lame ghost stories, presumably in order to boost Milntown’s
reputation as a haunted house. I was
more interested in the story about the flock wallpaper in the dining room,
which was put up in the early 1970s.
Apparently a lot of the rolls were found to be substandard because it
was manufactured during the three day week, and the manufacture of flock
wallpaper needs a reliable electric current.
We returned from Ramsey along the A18 mountain
road, which forms part of the TT circuit.
I don’t know how anyone could concentrate on racing along that road. The
views were even more spectacular than those on the coast road we had driven up
in the morning.
On day one we had concentrated on history
and places of interest from the eighteenth century onwards. On our second and
final full day we drove westwards to Peel in order to delve into the island’s
more distant past and discover the Isle of Man that my lecturer had in mind all
those years ago.
Peel Castle is located on St Patrick’s
Isle, so called because legend has it that St Patrick actually visited this
tiny island, bringing Christianity to the Isle of Man. Whilst that may not be a historical fact, there
was certainly a community of monks on the site before Magnus Barefoot, the 11th
century Viking King of Mann, built a fortress there.
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| Peel Castle |
I was surprised to find that there were no
guidebooks for sale at the entrance, only free audio guides. I normally avoid
audio guides, but there was nothing else to be done. The man at the kiosk
explained that these were not at all like National Trust audio guides – each
numbered stop was just one minute of recording, and you could listen in any
order, or not, as you pleased. He warned
us to watch out for rabbit holes and pointed out the on-site toilet facilities:
“very modern, hot running water”.
Continuing the theme, the first numbered point of interest I came to
turned out to be a garderobe (a 3-seater). According to the audio guide, the
sewers were the weakest part of any castle. It was necessary to make holes in
the walls to let out the waste, but any way through the walls was also a
potential way in.
After Peel Castle we visited the House of
Manannan, named after the Isle of Man’s legendary sea god, Manannan. This is a
visitor experience rather than a museum, and tells the story of the Isle of Man
through audiovisual presentations, with the white-bearded Manannan. Visitors
first enter a reconstruction of a Celtic roundhouse, which was much larger than
I expected. Approximately 60 full-grown trees would have been required to build
a house like this, which is a type unique to the island. The island’s story continued with the coming
of Christian monks and the fusion of Celtic and Viking culture, illustrated by
a reconstruction of a Viking longhouse. The final exhibit on the ground floor
was Odin’s Raven. This is a
two-thirds replica of the Gokstad Viking longship from Norway, which was built
to celebrate a thousand years of the Isle of Man’s Viking parliamentary
tradition in 1979.
We must have taken a wrong turning on our
way upstairs as we found ourselves in a somewhat incongruous exhibition
celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Institute, before returning to
the ‘Story of Man’ with the Island’s nautical heritage (including a sailmakers’
loft and a kipper smokehouse). There are still kipper smokehouses in Peel. One
proclaims proudly on its wall ‘We Post Kippers.’ I enjoyed their products for
breakfast during my stay, but I’m not sure that I would trust them to the Royal
Mail.
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| Peel P50 |
As befits the home of the Peel P50, the
world’s smallest production car, the Manx Transport Heritage Museum, a short
walk from the House of Manannan, was very small museum indeed (only 60 square
metres in size). Despite its diminutive
size, it contains a lot of material, including original adverts. The prize
exhibit is an original Peel P50 made in 1964, manufactured at the Peel
Engineering factory only 300 yards from the museum, on the other side of the
river. The Peel company made various fiberglass products, including fairings
for racing motorcycles before developing the P50, a tiny one-seater vehicle. An
original advert claimed that the P50 was ideal for a businessman commuting into
town or a housewife doing the shopping, but having examined the car closely, I
have no idea where this hypothetical housewife would actually put any of her
purchases.
After a brief detour northwards to Jurby,
where we found an incredible second-hand bookshop, a massive hangar with books
piled haphazardly all over the place, we drove along more of the island’s
scenic roads to St John’s to look at the Tynwald Hill. ‘Tynwald’ is a word of Viking origin, based
on the Norwegian ‘Thing vollr’. It is
the ancient assembly ground where the Manx parliament and people meet once a
year in the open air to hear the proclamation of new laws. The Tynwald dates
back to the time of the Manx Kings of the Isles, the last of whom died in 1265
AD, and may even be older than the Icelandic Parliament, which was established
in 930 AD. The ceremony traditionally took place on Midsummer Day, 24 June,
(the feast of St John the Baptist in the Christian calendar.) Since the change to the Gregorian calendar in
1752, the ceremony has been held on 5 July.
On our last day we drove to Castletown, the
historic capital of the Isle of Man. The castle in Castletown is Castle Rushen,
one of the best preserved medieval castles in Europe. It originated in the Norse period, with the
fortification of a strategic site by the Norse kings. The central stone keep is
believed to date from the period of the last Viking King of Mann, Magnus, who
died at the castle in 1265, according to the Chronicles of the Kings of Man and the Isles. In 1405 Henry IV
granted the Island of Mann to Sir John Stanley, and it became a hereditary right
of the Stanleys on payment of two peregrine falcons to all succeeding monarchs
on their coronation. The Stanley family remained as Kings of Mann and the Isles
until 1736.
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| Castle Rushen |
The castle’s excellent state of
preservation was not a good thing as far as I was concerned. Rather than admiring romantic ruins from the
safety of ground level, we had to follow a route through the castle keep, which
involved climbing scarily steep spiral stairs.
I was a nervous wreck by the time we reached the top. The interior was very well presented though, dressed
as it would have been in its heyday, with wall hangings, table set for a
medieval banquet, complete with roast peacock, in the lord’s private dining
hall. In the garrison captain’s lodgings, the captain could be found in the
garderobe, complete with sound effects.
After we escaped from the Castle, we rushed
back to the Old House of Keys, only to discover from the board outside that we should
have bought tickets already, either from the Castle or the Old Grammar School. Having
finally obtained the necessary tickets at the Old Grammar School, we were
admitted to what I can only describe as a committee room, with an ‘agenda’ laid
out at each seat. This was to be an
interactive experience. I have spent quite a lot of my career as a committee
administrator and could not believe I had willingly gone on holiday to a
committee meeting! We, together with the other visitors took the places of
twenty two members of the Keys. The other two members were the Secretary (represented
by the volunteer running the event), who sat at a separate desk, and the
Chairman, represented by an animated sculpture, who sat on a dais. Two of the portraits on the walls turned out to
be AV screens which came to life to depict individuals who addressed the house
on various matters. We considered (and
voted on) eight motions, from the dangerous and unheard of principle of
allowing members of the Keys to be elected, via votes for women, and closure of
the roads for motor racing, to membership of the EU (this last has yet to be
considered by the real House of Keys.)
My history lecturer had a reputation for
being a formidable presence in committee meetings. I wonder what she would have
made of it all.
First published in VISA 126 (April 2016)
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