Thirty six hours on Man. Exiled from England and the ways of the English should be no bad thing, we suppose, on the flight over the Irish Sea.
We leave London’s rush hour and land fifty minutes later in out of season Ronaldsway. It’s March and, unsurprisingly, blustery, but the plane put down neatly, if uncomfortably close to King William’s College . King Bill’s, as it is otherwise known, is a ringer for Hogwarts, and so close to the landing strip that the school advertises itself as being walking distance from the airport. They should know.
A friend, recently moved to Man, meets us. There’s barely breathing space between landing and picking up our luggage and we can see him waving through the glass partition. ‘Welcome to kipper island’, he says: a reference to the island delicacy, we hope. Douglas, the main town, is half an hour’s drive away and on cursory inspection is rather like Brighton: built around the same period for the same groups of upright Victorian tourists, and sporting great white seafront buildings and plenty of handsome shop fronts.
Unlike Brighton, though, advantageously positioned as London’s younger and more alluring sister, Douglas has never recovered from the drubbing it received at the hands of cheap package tours to the continent. Whichever way you look at Douglas you find it looking right back, all wounded pride and thuggish insolence.
So, if it’s culture or sophisticated island life you’re looking for, best move on now. But even with its down at heel seafront and determinedly 50’s air, Douglas and the rest of Man is offering something in short supply in Brighton: a welcome lack of the worst glut of tourists and their concomitant tat. Instead it offers great swathes of glorious coastline, plentiful walks and views blessedly uninterrupted by thirty thousand day trippers down from London.
Visiting out of season offers even more advantages. It will be a full three months until the TT revs some life into the island when maniac motorbikers race around the island and it’s hard to find a decent b&b, or even a campsite willing to take another flapping tent. But at this time of year we’re spoilt for choice and we’ve booked a room at the Empress (middling to overpriced) which promises a sea view and a smashing breakfast.
The Empress is a huge wedding cake of a building with a sign on the glass front doors saying push: which then open automatically. We lurch through, unharmed for the time being. We’re delighted, and not entirely surprised, to find The Empress sporting all the usual 1980’s conveniences: tubular furniture, huge black and white photos on the reception walls and, rather alarmingly, a life size statue of a black singer: a sort of giant lawn jockey come black and white minstrel. We’re unsure whether we should be offended or not but since the east European staff don’t seem at all perturbed by their only black guest looking askance we go gamely onwards. Later on, bags filleted, we spend an amusing half hour during lunch at The Bridge pub plotting our revenge over plates of well-buttered fish pie and glasses of gin and tonic.
Our only full day on Man is spent touring the island by car, and we covered every coastal town. Our choice was clockwise or anti-clockwise from Douglas. We settled on anti-clockwise because it offered a garage and the prospect of a full tank, and so we take on Castletown and Peel by lunchtime and Snaefell and Point of Ayre for afters. Hands down Peel is the best of the mostly good to excellent bunch of small towns. It’s a glorious little place with a wonderful castle, crisp views and an utterly captivating shack (the Peel Breakwater Kiosk) offering kipper baps at the swimming in butter for lunch. I’d recommend a weekend on Man just for the kipper baps and the views from the castle. We also caught sight of a seal, the absolute highlight of our stay, notwithstanding the kippers and the lawn jockey.
Touring the island at such speed scarcely gave us time to get our bearings. Just as we would reach the top of a hill our host would point over moorland and water and exclaim ‘Look I can see Scotland!’ and then minutes later ‘Look! I can see the coast of Ireland’. It had a rather disconcerting effect, as though we were constantly lost, but the locals say that if you go to Man you can see seven kingdoms in a day: Man, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the kingdoms of Heaven and Neptune.
By the time we reached Snaefell the top of the mountain was clinched in iron grey cloud and we weren’t tempted to get out of the car and get a drenching. It’s beautiful though, and the views, even below the summit, are huge and glorious: a landscape with real guts. Next we headed to Point of Ayre, the northern most tip of the island. Here the clouds cleared and we spied Scotland and had every ounce of strength and warmth blown out of us by a great freezing wind, and not having eaten for at least an hour we headed off to Ramsey for sustenance. For little people, who’ve stretched their legs enough, The Mad Hatter Cake Boutique serves top notch cake and tea, and offers a boldly decorated respite from any alarming weather you might meet.
Despite our best attempts to keep eating we also managed a modicum of culture: the island is scattered with Celtic crosses and standing stones, evidence of its history stretching back to 6000 BC. On our final morning we squeezed in a visit to the beautiful Tynwald Hill , arguably the site of the world’s oldest parliament stretching back one thousand years, and then walked through the stately National Arboretum. We were now less than two hours from leaving.
Since island currency isn’t legal tender in Britain the only sensible thing to do was offload our last Man pounds at the The Abbey restaurant, set in handsome grounds with a pretty stream that you must drive through to get to the airport. Our youngest host had a thick slab of chocolate torte as his main, much envied by the adults who had sensibly and enjoyably dined on good mushroom soup and ham hock terrine.
Of course, you have guessed: by now we were charmed. The Isle of Man, so small and homely, and so ill suited to the tastes of modern holidaymakers, is actually the perfect holiday destination. It is quiet and lacking in pretence, and probably won’t stay that way for much longer. There are other British holiday destinations (Cromer and Aldeburgh come to mind) that have cast off their Barbara Pym-like veneers and have been embraced by a younger, hipper crowd (well, if not younger, they have at least been embraced). But Man isn’t like that. Its out of season charms remain stubbornly unseasonal year round.
We put down our forks and paid our bill with the last of our island currency. We drove to Ronaldsway and said goodbye to our friends. Inside the airport, which seemed no bigger than an infant school assembly hall, the staff treated us like old friends. As we went through security we were ushered on with a kindly, ‘This way folks, you know the drill’. We certainly do now, and very reassuring it is. We expect to be back.