Curses & omens

Caillagh-ny-Faashagh, the Prophet Wizard

Also known as: Calgagh-ny-Ghueshag; The Old Woman of the Spells

Glenfaba and the Neb valley, near Peel and St John's

Morrison describes the seer as a wizard who lived in a quarry on a lonely mountainside and wandered the hills after dark, sometimes as a goat with great fiery eyes and sometimes as a giant man, crying out in a way that chilled anyone who heard it.

The prophecies are what people remembered. The river Neb shall run red from Glen Crew to the sea, the seer said, and people later took that to mean the Battle of Santwat in 1098. "There's a butt in Ballafesson worth the whole of Balladoole" was read as foretelling the Foxdale lead mines. Roads and railways would cross the mountains, and there would be an inn on the top of Snaefell. By Morrison's day all of those had come true, including the Snaefell summit hotel.

Moore gives a prophecy of a more personal kind: when the chapel of Keeil Vout was carried away by the flood, the Quirk family would no longer be in Slieau Whallian. He says that had happened about seventy years before he wrote, around the 1820s.

Two prophecies were still waiting in 1911: that the rulers of Mann would flee the island, and that women of Man and Scotland would wring a blanket between them across the sea, which is to say the two would come close enough to touch.

The map point is general to the Neb valley between St John's and Peel; no specific site is identified.
Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
Open ground
Location
54.205, -4.660 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: Sophia Morrison, "Manx Fairy Tales" (1911), "Caillagh-ny-Faashagh, or the Prophet Wizard" (Manx Note Book transcription) [public-domain]; A.W. Moore, "The Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man" (1891), ch. V Triage, Witchcraft, &c. (Manx Note Book transcription) [public-domain]

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