But whether the visitor proceed from Peel to Ramsey by highroad, with or without digressions, or resolve to make a day of it by boldly crossing the fells, he ought not to fail, in any event, before quitting the neighbourhood of Peel, to pay a visit to the famous Tynwald Hill, of which notice has already been shortly taken in passing. This lies to the left of the main road from Peel to Douglas, from which it is plainly visible, just before entering the village of St. John's. In itself it is quite inconspicuous—merely like a flattened round barrow, with a second, smaller round barrow, also flattened, on the top of it; but the spot is one of immense suggestiveness, as well as of great existing political interest. Every new Manx law that has passed the House of Keys, and received the royal assent, is here promulgated in the open air on July 5 in each year. The ceremony begins with a service in the adjoining church; and everyone then adjourns to the famous hillock—the Governor (who is now Lord Raglan), the House of Keys, the Deemsters, the Bishop, and the people. This rite is a genuine antiquity that has come down uninterruptedly from old time, not a mere artificial attempt at archaeological revival, like the Dunmow Flitch, in Essex—to compare small things with great. Here, in short, as its very name implies, is perhaps the last survival in Europe of out-of-door mass legislation—the living representative of a now almost vanished order that has left its traces in place-names over much of Scandinavian Great Britain. Dingwall, in Ross, which is virtually the same word; Thwing, high up on the Yorkshire Wolds; Laughten-en-le-Morthen (Laughten-in-the-Moor-Thing), in the extreme south of the same county; Thingwald, in the Cheshire Wirral; Tinwald Hill, near Dumfries—all point indisputably to the same phonetic origin—the Norse tinga (to speak)—and all indicate alike the former place of meeting of some more or less important kind of tribal assembly. In Norway, Canon Isaac Taylor reminds us, to the present day, the Parliament is called the Storthing, or Great Council. As to the constituents of this vastly old assembly, readers of Mr. Hall Caine will not need to be reminded that the two Deemsters are the chief judges of the island. The House of Keys, which corresponds with the English House of Commons, consists of twenty-four members, elected by a franchise that includes female suffrage. Man, however, still retains the equivalent of the English House of Lords; though its "Council" is not hereditary in character, but consists of such officials as the Bishop, the Archdeacon, the Deemsters, the Attorney-General, and others. The presence in this body of ecclesiastical dignitaries reminds one of the constitution of the States of Jersey and Guernsey, in both of which the rectors of the historic parishes of the Channel Islands sit as of right at the seat of legislation. Indeed, the constitutions of all three countries—free States within a State—and their peculiar relation to England, are worthy of curious scrutiny and close comparative study.
On the present occasion we propose to make our way from Peel to Ramsey by neither of the two alternatives that have briefly been sketched above. We propose, on the contrary, to take a composite route—partly through the lowland, but mostly over hill—which will introduce us alike to Kirkmichael, and Bishop's Court beyond it, and carry us over the top of Snaefell—provided always that it be autumn, spring, or winter, and that the electric tramway is not running.
A BREEZY MORNING AT POINT OF AYRE.
The northern extremity of the Isle of Man with its lighthouse.
From Peel to Kirkmichael we either follow the highroad, which is never very far from the sea, or else take the roundabout route by Tynwald Hill and Glen Helen. Kirkmichael itself is a hard-featured little village stretching in a single, long street along the main road to Ramsey, and distant half a mile from the sea. Luckily, so far, it has escaped the blight of "development," and has plenty of character and local Manx colour. The church was rebuilt in 1835—no need to state in what style—but a fragment of its predecessor remains on the east of the graveyard. Near this is the tomb of Bishop Thomas Wilson (d. 1755), with an inscription by his son, "Who in obedience to the express Commands of his worthy Father, Declines giving him the Character He so justly Deserved. Let this island speak the Rest." There is a portrait of Bishop Wilson—no doubt sufficiently fanciful—in Mr. Hall Caine's Deemster, where he appears as the good native Bishop. Wilson, however, was really a Cheshireman, having been born at Burton-in-Wirral in 1663; and was educated as a sizar at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a contemporary of the saturnine Jonathan Swift. In 1692 he was appointed domestic chaplain to the ninth Earl of Derby, and tutor to his son, which determined the whole after course of his life. The Stanleys at this time were no longer "Kings of Man," but they still possessed authority almost regal. "In the year 1393 the Earl of Salisbury sold to Sir William le Scroop, afterwards Earl of Wiltshire, the Isle of Man, with the title of King, and the right of being crowned with a golden crown." In 1406, after some intermediate dealings with which we need not here concern ourselves, the island (still carrying with it, no doubt, the right to "the golden round") passed to Sir John Stanley, who died in 1414; and with the Stanleys it continued till it passed by the marriage of an heiress to the Atholl Murrays in 1736. The regal title, however, had been dropped by the second Earl of Derby (d. 1521), "as he preferred being a great lord to being a petty King." The famous island arms (Gules three legs in armour embossed and conjoined at the thighs proper, spurred and garnished, or) still figure among the many quarterings of the house of Stanley. They may also be found on old work in connection with buildings with which the Stanleys had presumably something to do—on the west front, for example, of the fifteenth-century tower of Bidstone Church in Cheshire, and on a misericorde in Manchester Cathedral.
RAMSEY BAY, LOOKING NORTHWARD.
Ramsey is the second town in size in the island and like Douglas faces East.