[CHAPTER IV]
FROM RAMSEY TO LAXEY
From Ramsey the visitor may travel seventeen miles south to Douglas, returning thence to Peel, if he like, by railway. At the very beginning, however, a digression should be made to Kirk Maughold and St. Maughold's Head, immediately beyond it. Kirk Maughold, beyond question, is one of the pleasantest villages in Man, and certainly for the archaeologist a shrine of the first importance. Even the little church, in this case, has some touches of mediaevalism (thirteenth-century lancets) that redeem it from the general charge of Manx ecclesiological dulness. The churchyard in which it stands—like that of Adel, in Yorkshire—is quite disproportionately large, containing, it is said, nearly four acres. For the sake of its church alone, however, no one would come to Kirk Maughold: the magnet that attracts one is the collection of crosses in the churchyard, now studiously protected in a picturesque shelter. These, of course, are mostly pre-Conquest—the term, it is true, in strictness has no real application to Man, but at any rate it serves roughly to indicate a style, if not to disclose a period. Man is as distinguished for the number and variety of its old crosses as its far away sister, Cornwall. Not that Cornish and Manx crosses have any close affinity—they belong, no doubt, to wholly different schools of ancient Celtic art. Cornish crosses, in particular, like those in Pembrokeshire and Iona, are generally cut more or less to the cross-shape (though it may be only a wheel cross), whereas those of Man are merely carved in relief on a slab of rectangular slate. "The erect cross-slabs," says the late Mr. J. Romilly Allen, "are, with a few unimportant exceptions, peculiar to Scotland and the Isle of Man. They are probably older than the free-standing crosses, because the erect cross-slabs are not treated architecturally (as the high crosses of Ireland are), but resemble more nearly than anything else ornamented pages from the Celtic illuminated MSS. directly translated to stone with hardly any modification whatever to suit the requirements of the new material to which the decoration was applied." "There is no district," says Mr. P. M. C. Kermode, in his beautiful volume on "Manx Crosses," of so small an area which can boast of so great a number of monuments of this class, extending over such a lengthy period, and having such a variety of interest—Ogam, Latin, and Runic inscriptions, Celtic art with its Scandinavian applications and development, Christian symbols and pagan myths. Altogether, according to this same authority, the island has one hundred and sixteen old crosses, extending over a period of six centuries, forty-five of which may be called Scandinavian and seventy-one pre-Scandinavian. Not one of the seventeen old parishes is wholly without an example, though Ballaugh, Lezayre, and Patrick have only one each. Kirkmichael, however, has ten; whilst Maughold has actually thirty-seven—by far the biggest collection in the island. Kirk Braddon also exhibits some extremely interesting examples. Most of these cross-slabs are commemorative of the dead; and one of the inscriptions at Kirkmichael (as in Black's Guide to the Isle of Man) may fairly be given as typical of the rest:
Joalf son of Thorolf the Red erected this cross to his mother Frida.
THE CALF OF MAN, FROM SPANISH HEAD.
The Calf is at the southern extremity of the island and is separated by the narrow and dangerous Calf Sound, on the right of the picture.
One of those, however, at Kirk Maughold is not strictly a cross-slab at all, but seems merely to have been carved on a face of rock by the village priest—perhaps in a moment of leisure on some pleasant summer afternoon, just as Wordsworth carved the name of "Joanna"