Category Archives: Manx Heritage

The gaiety of nations

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Gaiety Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man: marquee

Gaiety Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man: marquee

A couple of years ago I was invited to the Gaiety Theatre, Douglas to see the Douglas Choral Society’s production of Les Misérables, which is not my favourite piece of musical drama.  After three hours of Gallic posturing and carrying on (which theatre-folk refer to as The Glums, in tribute to the 1950s radio-programme Take It From Here), I commented to my host, my Isle of Man friend John, that though it wasn’t my favourite show I imagined we’d seen the best theatrical production on the Gaiety stage for at least ten years.

The Gaiety is a delightful theatre, one of Frank Matcham’s best survivors.  Dating from 1900, the heyday of the Manx tourist boom, it has superb fibrous plasterwork by De Jong & Co, extravagant house-tabs dripping with ropes and tassels, and the only surviving example of a Corsican trap – an essential requirement for Dionysius Lardner Boucicault’s melodrama, The Corsican Brothers (1852), which doesn’t often get an airing.

This gorgeous jewel of Victorian entertainment struggled for years to earn its keep as a cinema, and was rescued by the Isle of Man Government in 1971.  It could have been pulled down, but was restored in 1976.  It’s by far the most attractive cultural venue on the island, and it serves local communities and holiday visitors in conjunction with the adjacent Villa Marina.

Early this year John’s then-teenage son, Matthew, texted me to ask if he needed to see Miss Saigon.  Yes, I said, most definitely.  Indeed, I said, I’d get on a boat to see it if it was performed by the Douglas Choral Society.

Miss Saigon (1989) is the follow-up work to Les Misérables (1980), and was Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s second successful assault on the West End and Broadway.  It’s based on Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.  It’s a Kleenex job.  Complete with helicopter.

So I enjoyed a captivating evening in Frank Matcham’s stalls, watching the best of Manx theatrical talent pull out all the stops.  Rebecca Lawrence (Kim), Jonathan Sleight (Chris), David Artus (Engineer), Alex Toohey (John) and Kristene Sutcliffe (Ellen) gave performances which were utterly indistinguishable from the professional theatre, and they were backed up by scores of on-stage, back-stage and front-of-house workers.

What more could anyone ask of a Saturday night? – Matthew’s twentieth-birthday dinner at the excellent Coast Bar & Brasserie of the Claremont Hotel [http://www.sleepwellhotels.com/hotels/isle_of_man/claremont/restaurant.htm], the best show in town in a Frank Matcham theatre, and walking home along the gently curving Loch Promenade looking out to Douglas Bay.

This is what Dr Johnson meant by “the harmless stock of human pleasure”.

The Gaiety Theatre website is at http://www.gov.im/villagaiety.  The Douglas Choral Union is at http://www.douglaschoralunion.im/index.php.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Camp as a row of tents

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Cunningham's Holiday Camp Escalator, Douglas, Isle of Man (2009)

Cunningham’s Holiday Camp Escalator, Douglas, Isle of Man (2009)

Margaret, one of the guests on the 2011 Liverpool’s Heritage tour, asked me out of the blue what I knew about Dodd’s holiday camp at Caister, Norfolk.  Absolutely nothing, I had to admit.

I promised to check it out, and found that I’d missed an important landmark in the history of twentieth-century British holidays.

John Fletcher Dodd was a 44-year-old grocer and magistrate and a founder-member of the Independent Labour Party who bought a couple of acres of land on the Norfolk coast to set up the Caister Socialist Holiday Camp in 1906.

This was by any standards a spartan affair – teetotal, segregated and entirely tented (though wooden chalets appeared from 1912, and a later picture shows fifteen Great Yarmouth tram bodies lined up on the cliffs, open-toppers which must have been ideal for sunbathing).

The entertainment consisted of camp-fire sing-songs and lectures from such figures as Keir Hardie and George Bernard Shaw.  There were blanket bans on alcohol, mixed bathing, swearing and children under two.

Over the years, the regime softened and the socialist ethic was moderated.  John Fletcher Dodd stayed firmly in charge until he died, aged ninety, in 1952, the year after the camp reopened post-war.  It’s still in business as Caister Caravan Holiday Park:  http://www.haven.com/parks/norfolk/caister/index.aspx.

Its centenary produced a plethora of celebratory news features in the Daily Express [http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/395/CARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPING], the Daily Mail [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1200465/Torremolinos-aint-Holiday-snaps-bygone-age-bonny-babies-knobbly-knees-holiday-camps-Fifties-Britain.html], the Daily Mirror [http://www.mirror.co.uk/advice/travel/2006/01/07/hi-de-hi-comrades-115875-16556808], The Sun [http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/travel/38427/Tons-up-for-holiday-camps.html?print=yes] and the Black Country Bugle [http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/Happy-Campers-who-caught-the-holiday-bug-2.htm], among others.

Though Dodd claimed to be the founder of the British holiday camp, there was an earlier pioneer in the Isle of Man.  Joseph Cunningham was a Presbyterian baker from Liverpool who established a tented camp for single men only at Howstrake, on the newly-opened electric railway line, in 1894.

After a devastating storm in 1903 Joseph Cunningham relocated to a five-acre site in Little Switzerland, in Upper Douglas, where he provided 1,500 eight-man tents and a dining pavilion.  The regime was teetotal and the camp was largely self-sufficient, growing its own fruit and vegetables and maintaining its own herds of cows and pigs.

To the annoyance of Douglas hotel and boarding-house proprietors, the tented camp was rated as agricultural land, so the entire property was valued at only one-seventh the value of a forty-room boarding house.  Joseph Cunningham justified this by arguing that his thousands of visitors could not otherwise afford to visit the island and yet contributed significantly to the summer-season economy.

Cunningham himself could afford to fly his own monoplane between the wars, taking off and landing at a field near the camp.

Cunningham’s Camp survived into the post-war period, but the site is now redeveloped.

A long-lasting relic and curiosity of this piece of holiday history is the Cunningham’s Douglas Holiday Camp Escalator, installed in 1920, duplicated in 1938, and abandoned in 1968.  To practical purposes a sedentary paternoster, this noisy device to give campers a lift from the promenade operated free of charge until 1963.  It remained in position, and is illustrated in Charles Guard’s video/DVD, More Curiosities of the Isle of Man (Manx Heritage Foundation 2004) [http://www.dukevideo.com/General-Interest/DVD/Isle-of-Man/More-Curiosities-of-Isle-of-Man-DVD.aspx].

Update:  A press-release in February 2013 announced the imminent demolition of the chairlift:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/cunningham-s-holiday-camp-chairlift-to-be-scrapped-1-5375099.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

Wasting asset

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Queen's Pier, Ramsey, Isle of Man (2011)

Queen’s Pier, Ramsey, Isle of Man (2011)

The Isle of Man used to have a thriving holiday industry.  Well into the twentieth century the island was regarded as more exclusive than the Lancashire resorts of Blackpool and Morecambe, not least because it cost more to reach it.

The Manx holiday economy disappeared astonishingly quickly at the end of the 1960s, and the island economy has since been reinvented.  Tourism survives, up to a point, and many visitors to the island bring their motor-bikes.

It’s a pity that one of the grandest mementos of the Manx seaside, the Queen’s Pier at Ramsey, has been steadily neglected for twenty years.

Designed by Sir John Coode and constructed by Head, Wrightson & Co of Stockton-on-Tees between 1881 and 1886 at a cost of £40,752, it extended 2,241 feet out into the bay.

A new landing-stage was added in 1899, and before the First World War the pier brought around 35,000 visitors a year from what Manx people call “across”.

It ranks highly as a historic and engineering monument among the surviving seaside piers of the British Isles, particularly for its unusual cruciform steel piles.  There is a collection of images of the pier at http://www.geograph.org.uk/search.php?i=21927278.

The contractors’ three-foot gauge tramway was kept for a hand-propelled baggage van to load and unload passenger steamers.  In 1937 a small petrol locomotive was introduced, and in 1950 this was supplemented by a passenger railcar.

The steamer service stopped in 1970 and though the tramway continued until 1981, after repeated vandalism the pier closed completely in 1991.

In 1994 Tynwald, the Manx Government, decided to mothball the pier, and in the same year the Friends of Ramsey Queen’s Pier was formed to safeguard and promote the pier as an asset and a national monument.

It’s no accident that on the Friends’ website [http://www.queenspier.org], three quarters of the chronological history is given over to the post-1994 controversies over whether to restore the pier or demolish it.

In 2011, as an indication of positive intent, Tynwald has voted £1,800,000 for minimal maintenance to safeguard the structure for future restoration.

It’s a start…

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

Milntown – more than a cup of tea

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Milltown House, Isle of Man

Milltown House, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man’s latest historic site to open is Milntown, a country house and garden on the outskirts of Ramsey.  (This is a reversal of history, for Ramsey was, until the late 1880s, on the outskirts of the Milntown estate.)

The house is a delightful early-nineteenth century Gothick confection, built around a seventeenth-century core on an estate that belonged to the McCrystyn, later Christian, family from the early fifteenth century at least.

This was the birthplace of the great Manx hero, William Christian, otherwise Illiam Dhone or Brown William (1608-1663) [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illiam_Dhone].  Fletcher Christian, the instigator of the mutiny on the Bounty was of the same family.

After the Christian family left, Milntown was a school, a hotel and then a private house belonging to the owners of Yates’ Wine Lodges.  The last owner, Sir Clive Edwards, left the estate in trust to the Manx people, and it’s now gradually opening up for public enjoyment.

In an interesting reversal of UK National Trust practice, visitors enter through the tea-shop to reach the proudly organic gardens, which provide produce for the kitchen and an array of the sort of flowers that the monochrome photographer Cecil Beaton sourly described as “retina irritants”.

Designed by Richard Lucas, the garden is a vivid, crowded, complex place to wander, with woodland walks, seats and a mill-pond.  The waterwheel of the 1794 mill turns idly, and the mill will one day open to the public.

This will be a site to return to – not least for the serious catering.  When you walk in to pay your admission, you see satisfied customers tucking into the full cake-stand for afternoon tea.  It’s difficult to resist the temptation on the way out.

Details of Milntown’s opening arrangements are at www.milntown.org.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Losing track

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Douglas Corporation Tramway, Isle of Man: trackwork at Derby Castle (2010)

Douglas Corporation Tramway, Isle of Man: trackwork at Derby Castle (2010)

In the Isle of Man, if something works it doesn’t need fixing.  That’s why the island is a treasure-house of Victorian transport.  Eventually, though, even the simplest engineering wears out.

So Douglas Corporation, confronting its decaying promenade road-surface, has to make a decision about its unique horse-tram service.  Like-for-like replacement of the present double track is estimated at between £3 and £4½ million.

2010 passenger figures for the summer-season service are up slightly over the previous year at 54,286.  Last year’s annual loss is similarly down slightly to £207,700.  In 1938 the horse trams carried 2¾ million passengers and contributed to the transport department’s clear profit of nearly £10,000 (over £350,000 at current values).  As late as 1955 they still carried 1½ million people.

The tramway dates back to 1876, when it was built by Thomas Lightfoot, who moved to the island after inaugurating Sheffield’s horse trams.  The Douglas horse tramway survived because the seafront hoteliers objected to overhead electric wires in front of their premises.

Because there’s an efficient, faster bus service alongside the horse trams they are in effect a tourist ride.  The £3.00 flat fare means that nobody in their right mind uses them to travel a few stops.  Their only practical use is to travel from the Sea Terminal to the Derby Castle terminus of the Manx Electric Railway.

Alternative plans being discussed include building a replacement track for the horse-trams on the broad pedestrian seaward side of the promenade, segregating them from motor traffic.  Whether this would result in fewer or more collisions on the promenade is open to question:  the trams would no longer provide an obstruction, enabling the boy racers to accelerate.

Deciding to get rid of horse trams is a decision most towns made 120 years ago.  Maybe the 1890s proposal to electrify the line as a continuation of the Manx Electric Railway and to extend it to the railway station is worth looking at.  Not only would it integrate the three rail systems and delight enthusiasts, but it would still allow the horses and horse-trams to survive as a heritage feature.

This worked well in San Francisco, where the temporary suspension of the cable-car service in effect saved the surviving electric streetcars.

Indeed, a 2013 proposal specified that the relocated single-and-passing-loops horse-tram track should be designed to carry Manx Electric “or more modern rolling stock”:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/plan-for-single-track-horse-tram-to-run-on-sea-ward-side-of-prom-1-6198526.

There are detailed instructions for catching a Douglas horse tram (and for patting the horse) at http://www.iomguide.com/horsetram.php.  Further information about the Douglas horse tramway can be found at http://www.douglashorsetramway.net.

Amateur footage of the tramway is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYl4JiQ7cV8&app=desktop.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Island of hidden gems

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Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church, Ramsey, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man lacks a volume of Pevsner’s great buildings series:  Sir Nikolaus spent much of his life compiling the first edition Buildings of England, and since he completed the original series in 1974 his successor editors have additionally laboured at the Buildings of Wales, Buildings of Scotland and Buildings of Ireland.  The Isle of Man belongs to none of these territories, and so far has no comparable catalogue of its architectural heritage.

This is a pity, because the island contains a wealth of structures, from pre-medieval crosses and chapels, called keeills, to high-quality nineteenth- and twentieth-century churches and public buildings.  Among the nationally-known architects who have worked on the island are George Steuart, Peter Paul Pugin, John Loughborough Pearson and his son Frank Loughborough Pearson, Ewan Christian (based in England but descended from an old Manx family), Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and the theatre-architect Frank Matcham.

Alongside these luminaries, Giles Gilbert Scott built Our Lady Star of the Sea & St Maughold RC Church on the seafront at Ramsey in 1908-10.

It’s immediately recognisable as by the same hand as Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral by its simple, sheer surfaces, tricked out with decorative features high up, including a crucifix high on the liturgical east wall (which actually faces west) and a balcony at the top of the hip-roofed tower.  Carving dies into the stonework, exactly like the Lady Chapel of Liverpool Cathedral.  Much of the Horsforth stone tracery is obscured on the outside by protective glazing.

Within, the interior is lit only on the (geographical) south:  the opposite wall is blank except for a low Gothic arch opening into the Lady Chapel and the windowless wall behind the altar is dominated by a dramatic full-height painted triptych.

Designed when Scott was in his twenties, shortly after he began work on his great cathedral, Our Lady Star of the Sea is an unexpected, precious piece of architectural genius in the wide-open spaces of the under-developed resort-town.

The Isle of Man is full of surprises.

Service times for Our Lady Star of the Sea & St Maughold are available at http://www.ourladyandstmaughold.org.  Background information on all the Catholic churches on the Isle of Man is at http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/parishes/rcath/rc.htm.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Taking the train for tea

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Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station: loco no 12 Hutchinson

Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station: loco no 12 Hutchinson

My Isle of Man host John and I watched the Royal Wedding, toasted the happy couple in Sauvignon Blanc (because the island – or at least the island’s co-op – had apparently run out of champagne) and wondered what else to do for the afternoon, rather than watch Huw Edwards busking while waiting for something to happen.

We caught the steam train one stop, from Port St Mary to the end of the line at Port Erin, and went for tea at the utterly seaside Cosy Nook Café [http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g616277-d1863309-Reviews-Cosy_nook_cafe-Port_Erin_Isle_of_Man.html], walked back up the hill and took the same train back an hour later.  For £4.00 return, rather than £3.20 on the bus.

It is of course a delight to travel, even for a few minutes, in a wooden railway compartment with windows that let down on leather straps.

Even more, it’s satisfying to be able to use a Victorian heritage line as practical transport.

As we watched the red locomotive and carriages chug off towards Douglas, I remarked that this railway wasn’t designed to be cute.

When it opened in the 1870s this was practical modern transport, scaled down to the geography of the island.  It opened up towns like Port St Mary and Port Erin, and enabled people to travel across the island quickly and relatively cheaply for the first time.

The system of four lines, run by two companies, survived because it worked, and because the manager between the wars surreptitiously subsidised the steam trains from the revenues of the bus routes.

The routes to Peel and Ramsey eventually expired in the 1960s, and the remaining Douglas-Port Erin line was in effect nationalised in 1977.

It’s now heavily marketed as a tourist attraction, which rivals the bus-service in speed though not in frequency.  When the TT annually blocks the island’s road-system, it provides a much-needed commuter service.

Meanwhile the Peel and Ramsey trackbeds remain substantially intact as footpaths [see Walking the Manx Northern Railway].

Details of the Isle of Man Railway services services appear at http://www.iombusandrail.info/imr-steamrailway.html.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Where Florrie Forde spent her holidays

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Florrie Forde's cottage, Niarbyl, Isle of Man

Florrie Forde’s cottage, Niarbyl, Isle of Man

On the pretext of fish soup at the excellent café at Niarbyl http://www.isleofman.com/business/n/niarbyl-cafe/, on the west coast of the island, my Isle of Man host-with-the-most John insisted we walk down from the café to the beach to see the point where North America joins on to Africa (see http://www.manxgeology.com/dalbygrp.html) and Florrie Forde’s cottage.

I tried to sound as if I knew at least something about Florrie Forde, but in fact I had to consult the wisdom of Wikipedia to discover that she was one of the most interesting – and now too much forgotten – figures of British entertainment in its transition from music-hall to variety.

Born in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in 1875, she ran away to the Sydney music-hall at the age of sixteen, and five years later came to Britain where she started her music-hall career, thrice nightly, on August Bank Holiday 1897, began her recording career in 1903, and appeared in the first Royal Command Variety performance in 1912.

What attracted my particular interest was the list of her “hits”:  these are the songs my grandmother sang as she did her housework – ‘Down at the Old Bull & Bush’, ‘She’s a lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’.  One of the most poignant songs in Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War is ‘Goodbye-ee’, originally made famous by Florrie Forde.  Most people would link the Blackpool organist Reginald Dixon with ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’, but it was Florrie’s tune first.

And this towering figure in British entertainment, whose summer season for much of the 1930s was in Morecambe, apparently sailed across the Irish Sea on the Steam Packet, and must have used a motor-car to reach this remote spot, virtually beyond even Manx bus-routes, to gaze across the sea at sunset.

She died on tour, entertaining the troops in Aberdeen, on April 18th 1940.

Florrie Forde’s cottage is strictly private property.  When visiting Niarbyl, please do not disturb the owners.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Manx Mighty Wurlitzer

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Villa Marina, Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man

Villa Marina, Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man

The Manx Government acquired their magnificent Wurlitzer organ in 1989 and initially installed it in the now-demolished Summerland centre.  At last it has been meticulously restored and rebuilt in the Villa Marina arcade, sandwiched between the Gaiety Theatre and the Villa Marina concert hall.  This 1929 instrument came originally from the City Cinema, Leicester, rescued by a wealthy organ-enthusiast, Allan Hickling, and installed in his home, Dormston House, Sedgeley [see http://www.villagaiety.com/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/villagaiety/allanhicklingand.xml&menuid=11570].

Len Rawle, who led the renovation project, demonstrated its range and power in a Saturday-evening concert in May after a week of maintenance work and before running a seminar for the island’s aspiring organists.  (Len’s website is at http://www.lenrawle.eu/scripts/Biography.html.)

You can’t argue with the power of the mighty Wurlitzer.  There is something unmistakable in the bravura playing-style that the instrument demands – accelerandi, rallentandi, arpeggii, swells and swirls and, as Len pointed out, early in his presentation, contrast.  People sometimes assume incorrectly that a theatre-organ is amplified, and Len showed how its core works perfectly well as a church organ playing classical pieces.  He gave an admirable conducted tour of the Wurlitzer specification – the stops designed specifically to create a “unit orchestra” to accompany silent movies, the additional keyboard links that provide bells, xylophone and vibraphone and the special effects for film accompaniment such as the motor-horn, the fire-engine and the birdsong which, he gently pointed out, should be used with discretion.

Noël Coward’s petulant line in Private Lives, “extraordinary how potent cheap music is” has the ring of truth.  Popular classics such as ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ and ‘When I Fall In Love’ scrub up to a high polish on a Wurlitzer, and Len’s repertoire included less familiar music of the period.  He brought his evening to a close with both the Manx national anthems, the nostalgic ‘Ellan Vannin’ and the staunch ‘Arrane Ashoonagh dy Vannin’ [‘Land of our birth, gem of God’s earth, O Island so strong and so fair…’].

There’s no following that with an encore.  What Len actually did was to shoo the audience away so that a young girl could have privacy to try out the Wurlitzer on her own.  As he said, that was what got him started a few decades ago.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Walking the Manx Northern Railway

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Manx Northern Railway between St Germain's and Kirk Michael

Manx Northern Railway between St Germain’s and Kirk Michael, Isle of Man

If it’s not possible to ride a railway line – because someone removed the track – the best way to understand it is to walk it.  When the Manx railway-system was reduced to a single route in the 1970s, the Manx Government had the prescience to preserve much of the disused trackbed as footpaths.

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John and I walked the stretch of the former Manx Northern Railway from St Germain’s (where the station is now beautifully restored as a house) to Kirk Michael (where the railway station is now the fire station).

The Manx Northern was built to take mineral traffic from the Foxdale mines directly to Ramsey harbour, using the only route possible for steam locomotives round the west side of the island.  When the Foxdale mines eventually failed, the MNR became part of the Isle of Man Railway.  Meanwhile, passengers between Douglas and Ramsey had gained a more direct route when the Manx Electric Railway was built along the precipitous east coast of the island.

The Manx Northern route is spectacular.  Walking up to the summit at Ballaquine and down to Kirk Michael is not strenuous, but the gradients are palpable.  The ivy-covered piers of the major viaducts, Glen Wyllin and Glen Mooar, remain without the lattice deck that carried trains:  you feel the height involved while crossing from one abutment to the other by steep paths and flights of steps.

Travellers who are disinclined to walk the line can follow much of its course, and appreciate its spectacular views of the island’s west coast, on the Peel-Ramsey double-deck bus [routes 5 and 6], which is what John and I did – travelling in eight minutes the distance we’d walked in 2½ hours – when the pub in Kirk Michael proved unable to provide any kind of lunch.

Instead we went to the excellent Creek Inn in Peel [http://thecreekinn.co.uk/], where we were served by a star barman called Chris, and ate smoked salmon wrapped in asparagus and spicy chicken wraps with excellent beer and friendly service.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.