My friend John marks decennial birthdays in considerable style. 

For his fiftieth birthday, not long after he’d become a Manx resident, he hired the Sound Café, at the very tip of the island, and provided an entirely Manx buffet supper from lamb to queenies, so that guests from “across” (as Manx people refer to the other, larger island to the east) had the benefit of one of the finest of the many fine views around the island’s coast.

The café is a remarkable building, completed in 2002 to the designs of the Manx architects Kellett & Robinson.  It’s entirely unobtrusive in its magnificent setting, dug into the hillside with a grass roof, so that it’s invisible until you’ve walked past it.

It’s one of my favourite Manx places to eat and drink.

The panoramic picture windows look across to the other “other” island to the south, the Calf of Man, accessible with difficulty, despite its four harbours, because of the unpredictable waters of the Calf Sound, a treacherous stretch of water in which the current runs at up to eight knots.  (This didn’t dissuade a mid-nineteenth century owner, George Carey, a former London barrister, from attempting agriculture by swimming cattle across the Sound at low tide.)

Successive efforts to develop the Calf have had little success:  farming, lead mining and tourism alike failed, and in 1937 F J Dickens of Carnforth bought the island and presented it to the UK National Trust for preservation as a bird sanctuary.  It was leased to the newly-formed Manx National Trust in 1952, initially for twenty-one years, and is now vested in Manx National Heritage, and leased to the Manx Wildlife Trust.

The submerged Chicken Rock, 1½ miles south of the Calf, presented a hazard to shipping until the engineer Robert Stevenson built two lighthouses in 1818.  These were superseded by the Chicken Rock Lighthouse in 1875.  This was replaced with a new installation on the Calf in 1968, which was itself decommissioned in 2007:  Calf of Man.

The population in 1851 was 51, including four lighthouse keepers, but in the twenty-first century it is virtually uninhabited:  the wardens who maintain it as a wildlife sanctuary are resident between March and December, during which months the resident population is effectively two.

For the best of reasons, the Calf is not an easy place to visit:  Wayback Machine.  It’s much easier to chose a table at the Sound Café, and relax with a drink and a plate of Manx cuisine.