The garrison at Castle Rushen believed there were apartments under the castle that had been shut up for as long as anyone could remember, and that they led somewhere no living person should go. Waldron heard that about fifty years before his time a bold man decided to find out. He tied a ball of packthread at the entrance and went down into the dark, unwinding it as he went.
He walked, he said, for about a mile, and then came to a place where there was light, and two fine houses. He knocked at the first, and a servant let him in and let him go on to the second but warned him not to enter. Through the parlour window of the second house he saw a figure asleep on a marble table: a giant, about fourteen feet long, with a huge sword lying by him. The man was so frightened that he turned back, followed his thread to the surface, and never went down again. The servant had told him that if he had gone in, he would never have come out.
A second story tells of a party who went down with torches and found an enormous old man, blind, with a long beard, sitting on a rock. He asked them how things were on the island and then asked one of them to shake hands. The man held out a ploughshare instead. The giant crushed it in his grip and said, with satisfaction, "There are yet men in the Isle of Man."
Comments