by Signe Pike
The town of Ramsey was nearly an hour by bus, the route taking me up the coast. This was the most I’d seen of the island so far, and it was breathtaking—undulating hills, grassy fields, forested glens with rushing waterfalls, sandy and pebbled beaches with towering cliffs.
Evening was setting in as we reached Maughold, the tiny village where I’d be staying, and the tall trees that lined the road were filled with songbirds chirping the evening rites. I found the office of the Venture Centre, and met one of its founders, Mike Read, at the check-in desk.
As Mike showed me to the private cabin I’d reserved across the street, I saw it overlooked the fields and, farther out, the ocean. It was rustic, to be sure, but comfortable.
“Now, you’re going to be on your own for tonight, so it’ll be pretty quiet over here,” he warned. “But tomorrow we have a big bunch of guys coming for the TT, so hopefully they’ll keep you entertained.”
Oh, lord. “Fantastic.” I managed a smile.
That night I dined on leftover cheese, some Irish whiskey I’d purchased in Castletown, and the three packets of biscuits that had been lovingly laid out in my cabin. With the bustling town of Ramsey two miles away, loneliness set in. It was dead quiet, and I’d been on my own without having much more than a passing conversation with anyone for four days. Compared to life in Manhattan, I felt like the lone survivor of a nuclear holocaust.
The next morning I headed out, sans map, to try and acquaint myself with the faeries living in Ballure Glen.
It was only down the main road a stretch, and I’d decided since I was crap at reading maps anyway I should try a new experiment—hiking by intuition. Normally (and especially in high-altitude areas where there are serious mountains and dangerous animals), this would be unadvisable. But here on the island, it was manageable. I kept walking until I came to a sparkling reservoir and decided to hike its loop, which I was unpleasantly surprised to find was dense with terrifying pines. There’s simply no other way to describe such a desolate, utterly disturbing forest, one that left no question in my mind: there be dark elves in yonder woods! Thankfully, the loop took me alongside, not through it.
As I headed into an open meadow, I decided it was time to begin.
“Okay, fair folk, I’m all yours. Take me to your leader!” I laughed. “Seriously though. Today I’m going to let you take me wherever you think I need to go,” I said aloud.
Ninefh had said I’d have nothing to worry about so long as I followed my intuition, so I did my best to quiet my mind and follow my instinct on which way to go, without questioning myself. I’m sure it was my imagination, but I really felt like I was being watched. Not in a bad way, just . . . noticeably. When I came to a fork in the trail, I paused, considering both options until a stone ruin nestled at the bottom of a sweeping hill in the distance caught my eye. It was a good distance off but I headed toward it, curious. After several minutes I reached it to find the walls intact, but the roof, windows, and door long gone. There was a gnarled tree by the edge of what might have been the side yard, and I touched its trunk. I had the feeling that whoever lived here had loved that tree, and I wondered how long they’d been gone. I felt a little spooked, yet stepped inside to find it was clear and clean with a simple stone floor. But something about the place gave me the creeps. Someone had left a cairn of rocks piled in the center of the room. And on the middle of the floor, a bizarre circular drawing had been etched in the stone.
Beating a hasty retreat back downhill, I continued on, forcing my feet to follow a wide path that ran through a dark, forbidding pine forest, ostensibly more foreboding than the one I’d passed before, because it looked to be the quickest way back to civilization. As the woods began to swallow me, I felt more and more certain that I really didn’t want to meet the faeries that lived in these woods. I sure could use an advocate now . . .
I sang softly and tried to relax, but something was building. I felt the gnawing feeling that there was something right behind me, something that wanted to hurt me.
I was being followed by someone, and he was gaining on me. In a flash, I understood. It wasn’t the faeries I needed to worry about—it was people that could cause me real harm. My heart pumping, I reached back and deftly pulled my pepper spray from my pack, putting it in my pocket, finger on the trigger. The next moment, I turned instinctively to look over my shoulder and nearly screamed.
In the middle of the dark pine forest, a blue men’s jacket was hanging, suspended from a dead branch.
When hikers drop things, often a Good Samaritan will pick it up and hang it from a branch or signpost on the trail. But this jacket wasn’t on the trail. It was hanging there, in the middle of the woods. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but all I knew was in that moment, I wanted to get as far away from that jacket as I possibly could.
Leaving the trail, I stumbled through the woods, my clothing getting caught on branches until I finally found my way back to the reservoir. There were people milling around, and a fisherman was packing up for the day. I’d been hiking a good four hours. I went back down to the glass-framed map to figure out where I had been and something caught my interest. There was a point on the map marked “Site of Betsy Crowe’s Croft,” which looked to be in a field located past the top of the pine plantation, across the road. I’d been there. But who was Betsy Crowe? A local hero of sorts? Perhaps a female politician? She must be someone of importance if her house was marked on the map.There was something in this, I could feel it. I knew I needed to unearth the story of Betsy Crowe. It wouldn’t be until I got home, at the end of my faery-hunting journey, that the true significance of the blue jacket would begin to take shape.
I was unpacking my hiking pack at the Venture Centre when I heard a great rumbling in the distance gradually approaching—the slow roar of motorcycles, an entire pack of them, pulling into the lot in front of my little cabin. It appeared my company had arrived, just as Mike promised. I peeked out my window and counted eight bikers, all clad in racing leathers and helmets. Well, this sure wouldn’t be boring. I was just finishing dinner when Mike brought them into the kitchen on their tour of the facilities. There were seven men ranging in age from midthirties to late forties, and the eighth looked to be about twenty.
“This is the kitchen,” Mike explained. “And this is Signe.”
“Hi.” I gave an all-encompassing wave. “I appreciate you coming all this way to entertain me. It’s been pretty quiet here so far.”
They laughed. We were off to a good start.
“I’m John,” said a man with sandy, cropped hair and keen blue eyes, extending his hand. “And this is Joe, Paul, Huw, Sam, Wol, John, and Mark.”
No way I was going to be able to remember all those names.
“We’re, ah, planning on going to the pub later, if you’d like to come along,” John offered.
“Oh! Well. I . . . I was thinking I’d . . . I have a lot of work to do, actually. I was planning on just staying here . . .”
“Work?!” John threw up his hands, completely exasperated. “What could you possibly be working on that’s better than a pint?”
The man had a point.
“Okay. Yes.” I surprised myself. “I’d love to come.”
“Good then!” John exclaimed. “We’ll come round you up when it’s time.”
And that’s how I came to be friends with the bikers.
That night we walked into town together and got to know one another over . . . more than one pint. Dark-haired Sam was nineteen and his father, sporting a shaved head and goatee, was Joe. Sam had ridden on the back of Joe’s bike on the trip, since his dad wasn’t quite ready to have him out on the road on his own. Joe, John (who’d first introduced himself), and Wol, a rather quiet man with gray hair, blue eyes, and a closely trimmed beard, were brothers. Then there was Paul, a burly man with curly, dark hair and glasses, Huw, a blond-haired, blue-eyed EMT, and Mark, a compact man with an easy smile. Last but certainly not least, there was “other John,” a tall, lanky blo
ke with dark hair and a weathered face. “You can call me Big John.” He grinned.
Except for Wol, who was from Wales, the bikers hailed from Birmingham, England, and came every year to the Tourist’s Trophy, the TT. I got plenty of good-hearted jeers as I told them about my purpose on the Isle of Man. As they taught me about the TT, I began to understand that this was more than just several days of racing—it was a huge social and cultural event. With the conversation flowing so freely, before I knew it, it was closing time. We packed ourselves into two taxis and headed back to the Centre. For the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn’t lonely. And when John said, “Come on now, Sig. It’s time to eat some chicken curry,” I knew I’d found a new home. A little drunk and in soaring spirits, we fell upon the huge vat of delicious curry, regaling one another with stories from our pasts.
The next morning I woke up to stirrings in the kitchen and got up to fix some yogurt and fruit. I patted Wol on the shoulder, who was standing over the stove sautéing mushrooms, and said a cheery good morning to the rest of the boys, who were sitting around chatting and drinking tea.
“You’ll have a full English, won’t you, Sig?” John asked.
“Full English? Like as in a full English breakfast?”
“Yeah. Do you like it?”
“Yes! I love it, but—”
“Wol!” he called. “Sig’ll have a full English.”
I shook my head, smiling to myself. I may not have encountered any faeries on Man as of yet, but I was pretty certain that I’d just encountered eight guardian angels.
The faery search proceeded haltingly. I’d spoken to people everywhere I could strike up a conversation, and nobody had anything significant to relate. Sure, if you asked about the faeries, any Manxman on the street would obligingly regurgitate the story about the tradition of greeting the faeries when crossing Fairy Bridge. Even my bikers never passed by without giving a nod or a salute, though it was born purely of superstition. Beyond that, I was pretty much striking out.
With very few leads, I decided a logical place to begin might be the Manx Museum in Douglas. And to make things interesting, rather than languishing at the bus stop, I decided to give the ol’ Manx Electric Railway a try. After all, the Lewaigue stop was only a few hundred yards from the Venture Centre.
The “tram,” as they call it, was incredible—I was in love.You flag it down, it stops, you get on a rickety, wooden, caboose-looking thing, and sit back to watch the fabulous scenery go by. With only one stop in each town, it wasn’t nearly as confusing as the bus. And the sheer abundance of enchanting glens between Maughold and Douglas was astounding. I watched as we whizzed past Ballaglass Glen, and Dhoon Glen, and fields strewn with four-horned Manx sheep and quaint thatched cottages.
It turned out that touring Man during TT was quite enjoyable, since I pretty much had the best places to myself. For example, I was one of four people in the entire, award-winning Manx Museum. My Manx Experience, as the museum called it, began in an auditorium, where I sat alone among a hundred empty seats as they showed a short film on the history of the island. Afterward I was set free to wander the exhibits with a far clearer understanding of what I’d be seeing.
The ancient roots of the Isle of Man, I learned, were Celtic. Suddenly, things were beginning to come together. England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man were all countries renowned for their faery lore. And of course, all of them were Celtic in origin. No wonder the folk stories were so similar from place to place. I found a new energy as I realized that to truly understand where faeries might have come from, I first needed to understand the Celtic culture. Moving over to the library, which was conveniently located within the museum, I lodged myself at a table with a stack of books.
Now I was getting somewhere.
14
The People Behind the Faeries
Of all the ancient gods, one of the last to live upon the earth with their ancient powers was Manannán Mac Lir, the tempestuous god of the oceans . . .
—PETER BERRESFORD ELLIS, CELTIC MYTHS AND LEGENDS
THE Celts were a mystical people, and as I sat there in the late afternoon hush of the library, letting the imagery of their ancient legends wash over me, their stories came to life. In a time before time, it was said that the Tuatha Dé Danann came from the north. Children of the great goddess Danu, they came from the four mythical cities of Falias, Gorias, Finias, and Murias, where they had perfected the hidden art of magic. Superior craftspeople, they were skilled beyond compare at poetry, music, metalwork, and even war. But beyond that, they had the magic at their fingertips to make themselves invisible to mortal men, travel back and forth in time and between worlds. They could change their appearance at will, and influence the weather. They could heal themselves of any wound—they had learned the secrets of immortality.
Listed as the fourth conquerors of Ireland in The Book of Invasions, the Tuatha were followed only by the Sons of Mil—the ancestors of both ancient and modern-day Celts. Some say the Tuatha came to Ireland by ship, others say on a cloud, still others say as a host of spirits on the wind, to take the land from the Fomorians, afterward battling the enigmatic people known as the Fir Bolgs.
The pantheon of the Tuatha Dé Danann is complex, and not without overlap, and there are volumes of texts and literature that detail their epic stories. But among the central figures was Danu, an ancient goddess of water (many believe the river Danube was named for her), mother of the Tuatha, and the goddess of all crafts. There was the Dagda, called the “All-father”; he was protector of the tribe and listed as the high king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. There was Lugh, the jack-of-all-trades: a warrior, a swordsman, a musician, a historian, a craftsman, and a sorcerer. Lir ruled over the sea. And there was Brigid. Daughter of the Dagda, she was the keeper of flame, wisdom, healing, holy wells. Later she would be so highly revered by the Celts that when Christianity gained footing, the mythos of St. Brigid was likely created to sway pagans into conversion—a saint associated with sacred flames. The Tuatha ruled in prosperity until the Sons of Mil came and ended their reign forever.
Also known as the eight sons of King Milesius, the Sons of Mil came from Spain, driving the magical Tuatha Dé Danann from their homes and thrones, and giving rise to the Celtic people. One poem in The Book of Invasions claims that some of the Tuatha Dé Danann chose to intermarry with the human invaders. But most chose to slip underground, into another dimension of space and time which would come to be known as Tír na nÓg, or the Land of Eternal Youth, rather than to continue living in the world of men. The gates to Tír na nÓg were within our mortal world—they were the very forts and portal tombs lived in by the Tuatha during their reign.
These places today are known as faery mounds or faery forts.
Now this is the stuff of myth, of faery tales. But it is here that the world of the gods who would become the Sidhe, or faeries, met the world of men. In an old manuscript known as The Annals of the Four Masters, there is an actual timeline to the rule of the Tuatha—stating they ruled Ireland from 1897 BC to 1700 BC. In fact, the Tuatha were considered a factual race of people/beings through the seventeenth century. I’m not kidding. And up to that point in Europe, The Book of Invasions was also taken as factual—it was even the basis of academic histories throughout the ages. It’s interesting that The Book of Invasions claims the Sons of Mil were from Spain, because in The Life of Agricola, Tacitus writes he believed the people of southern Wales were descended from Spain due to their darker complexion and curly hair. The Caledonians (Scottish) had large limbs and ruddy hair, and he thought them to be of German or Nordic descent, which to me harkens the Tuatha, or people from the north.
But the sad truth is that we will never know the exact nature of many of the Celtic deities and myth. Since the ancient Celts believed the written word was sacred, they kept their historical records through oral tradition rather than written account. If words equaled power, to have the secrets of their culture fall into the hands of their ene
mies was akin to cultural annihilation.
We do know for a fact that at the heart of the Celtic community were the Druids and the bards. The Druids kept the collective knowledge of planetary movements, the natural world, plants that could be used for healing, judicial law, and domestic matters.They were so highly revered that if a Druid judged a battle clearly won, he could walk into the midst of the raging war with his arms raised overhead, and both sides would immediately cease fighting. The bards were the oral record keepers. Through elegant epic poetry, they cradled the stories of the Celtic people dating as far back as human memory itself. It is from their accounts that The Book of Invasions was first recorded by Christian scribes in the eleventh century.
It was, of course, tempered by Christian ideals, and in addition, one can imagine the stories themselves had already fallen victim to hundreds of years of embellishment while being carried through oral tradition.
So scholars and historians must rely instead on archeological findings and written texts from the Celts’ conquerors: the Romans. Tacitus and none other than Julius Caesar himself told us much of what we know today about the Celtic people. When Caesar recognized that by annihilating the Druids he could bring the Celtic people to their knees, the unbridled fury of Rome was released and a massive effort was made to extinguish the Druids. Some survived for a time, fleeing to two small islands—Anglesey in Wales, and Iona in Scotland—before they were snuffed out entirely by the arrival of St. Columba, the Christian apostle of the Highlands. According to record, Druids disappeared from society entirely by the seventh century AD, but the bards . . . the bards continued on.
