This was an amazing walk, and I have the feeling we didn't scratch the surface.

You start in Castletown:




And then you head out round the coast. There's a ton of interesting geology around here.

It's limestone that's the really Big Deal. It has been quarried, burnt in kilns to make a fertilizer called quicklime, and exported. All these activities have left their mark on this area.

Limestone's incredible anyway, isn't it? Such an unlikely origin. Millions of tiny sea creatures in a warm tropical sea, and they all get squashed down to make rock? You couldn't make this stuff up...

There's more than limestone here, though. You can find fossils, and "dykes" (the places where the earth's crust cracked to allow molten rock to flow up), and lava, and all kinds of lichens. We need to go back. We were "just" out for a walk, and we didn't look carefully enough.

Anyway, here's what we did see:













Then there's Close ny Chollagh promontory fort. When it was excavated, in 1953, the researchers thought it was primarily a Viking site (and in fact it did have a mediaeval level, with a Scandinavian-style long-house). But there was also an Iron Age level, dating back to about 500 BC.


OK, so our photo doesn't show much of it, but there's a good aerial view, plus some artists' reconstructions, here. The archaeological evidence indicates that the residents of the site left suddenly, around 50 AD. And then there was no-one, for hundreds of years. So why the sudden flight? Were they seized by Roman galleys, and taken as slaves? (There are no Roman remains on the Island, but those guys were sailing up and down the coasts, and must have known it was there.) Or did they just decide to move? Round houses have been discovered inland, which began to be occupied at this period. Maybe they just felt it was too breezy right on the coast...

The most interesting way to return to Castletown is via Balladoole, but that has lots of interesting stuff of its own, so I'll put it in another post.