Our train was inching its way up a sharply pitched valley that seemed secluded from the rest of the world. To one side of the railway, the Laxey River plunged abruptly, bending south to disappear into the Irish Sea.
Everywhere, sheep grazed, and the gentle aroma of gorse drifted into the carriage. I looked out as the foliage gave way and we clattered higher and higher, as the train curved around the top of the bald mountain.
A screaming gust of wind welcomed our arrival at the top station, and I stared out at a sea that had transformed into churning waves. The vista stretched even farther. In the opinion of folklorists, the top one can see seven kingdoms, including those that aren’t recognised by any map.
I was able to see England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, but on the mountain top you can also spot that of Manannán mac Lir, son of the sea and king of the otherworld in Old Irish mythology, and the kingdom of heaven. For religious people, the journey is an imaginary pilgrimage.
Snaefell, or “Snow Mountain”, is no ordinary summit, and the Snaefell Mountain Railway is no ordinary locomotive. I was standing on the Isle of Man, at the summit of the island’s highest point, having travelled aboard the British Isles’ sole electric mountain railway.
To ride to the top is a deep tradition, but to learn about the train is to create a rich image of the Isle of Man. The tale of the railway is one of mass unemployment and emigration, engineering achievements and the boom of Victorian tourism, and it continues to cast its shadow over the island’s mythology, uncovering the independent spirit at the very core of Manx existence.
The day had started at the Manx Museum, the national museum of the Isle of Man in Douglas. The old hospital building is a nostalgic building by its very nature, with galleries devoted to Viking silver hoards, Celtic crosses and Tynwald (the world’s oldest continuous parliament) serving to condense the island’s 10,000-year history into manageable nuggets.
Most importantly, I wanted to know about the timeline of the railway, so I went through to the social history galleries and met Katie King, curator of art and social history.
“In the mid-19th Century, the Isle of Man was a mess,” she told us, as we slipped back in time symbolically. “There was slow growth in population, no jobs, runaway immigration, and the island’s coal industry was in freefall. The [Isle of] Man government was scared stiff by all this.”
It was a common complaint at the time in many communities in the British Isles. But the Isle of Man, a UK Crown Dependency, possessed a secret weapon: its powerful lieutenant governor, Sir Henry Brougham Loch, 1st Baron Loch.
In office between 1863 and 1882, Loch saw the potential for the island as a spa holiday destination. Seaside vacations were the rage during Queen Victoria’s time, and the Isle of Man, with its sandy beaches and invigorating waters, was ready to capitalise.
In a way, the island capital, Douglas, was its price. A shiny advertising campaign suddenly appeared on the London Underground in the 1870s, with idyllic sailing craft and lovely women in swimming dresses, recasting the working-class port town as a sybaritic holiday resort.
The trip to arrive there, from ports such as Blackpool, Whitehaven, Silloth, Ardrossan and Greenock by the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, the world’s oldest surviving continuously operating passenger shipping company, was also staged as an exotic sea voyage to an otherworldly island.
