Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/340



HE following paper exhausts no part of the subject: it simply embodies the substance of my notes of conversations which I have had with Manx men and Manx women, whose names, together with such other particulars as I could get, are in my possession. I have purposely avoided reading up the subject in printed books; but those who wish to see it exhaustively treated may be directed to Mr. Arthur W. Moore's book on The Folk-lore of the Isle of Man, which has just been published by Mr. Nutt.

For the student of folk-lore the Isle of Man is very fairly stocked with inhabitants of the imaginary order. She has her fairies and her giants, her mermen and brownies, her kelpies and water-bulls.

The water-bull or tarroo ushtey, as he is called in Manx, is a creature about which I have not been able to learn much, but he is described as a sort of bull who disports himself about the pools and swamps. For instance, I was Lold at the village of Andreas, in the flat country forming the northern end of the island and known as the Ayre, that there used to be a tarroo ushtey between Andreas and the sea to the west: that was before the ground had been drained as it is now. And an octogenarian captain at Peel related to me how he had once when a boy heard a tarroo ushtey: the bellowings of the brute made the ground tremble, but otherwise the captain was unable to give me any very intelligible description. This bull is by no means of the same breed as the bull that comes from Welsh lakes to mix with the farmer's cattle, for in Wales the result is great fertility among the stock and an overflow of