It is probably in some ancient May-day custom that we are to look for the key to a remarkable place-name occurring several times in the island: I allude to that of Cronk yn Irree Laa, which probably means the Hill of the Rise of Day. This is the name of one of the mountains in the south of the island, but it is also borne by one of the knolls near the eastern end of the range of low hills ending abruptly on the coast between Ramsey and Bride parish, and quite a small knoll bears the name, near the church of Jurby [131]. I have heard of a fourth instance, which, as I learn from Mr. Philip Kermode, editor of the Lioar Manninagh, is on Clay Head, near Laxey. It has been attempted to explain it as meaning the Hill of the Watch by Day, in reference to the old institution of Watch and Ward on conspicuous places in the island; but that explanation is inadmissible as doing violence to the phonetics of the words in question [132]. I am rather inclined to think that the name everywhere refers to an eminence to which the surrounding inhabitants resorted for a religious purpose on a particular day in the year. I should suggest that it was to do homage to the rising sun on May morning, but this conjecture is offered only to await a better explanation.
The next great day in the pagan calendar of the Celts is called in Manx Laa Lhunys, in Irish Lugnassad, the assembly or fair, which was associated with the name of the god Lug. This should correspond to Lammas, but, reckoned as it is according to the Old Style, it falls on the twelfth of August, which used to be a great day for business fairs in the Isle of Man as in Wales. But for holiday making the twelfth only suited when it happened to be a Sunday: when that was not the case, the first Sunday after the twelfth was fixed upon. It is known, accordingly, as the first Sunday of Harvest, and it used to be celebrated by crowds of people visiting the tops of the mountains. The kind of interference to which I have alluded with regard to an ancient holiday, is one of the regular results of the transition from Roman Catholicism to a Protestant system with only one fixed holiday, namely, Sunday. The same shifting has partly happened in Wales, where Lammas is Gwyl Awst, or the festival of Augustus, since the birthday of Augustus, auspiciously for him and the celebrity of his day, fell in with the great day of the god Lug in the Celtic world. Now the day for going up the Fan Fach mountain in Carmarthenshire was Lammas, but under a Protestant Church it became the first Sunday in August; and even modified in that way it could not long survive under a vigorous sabbatarian régime either in Wales or Man. As to the latter in particular, I have heard it related by persons who were present, how the crowds on the top of South Barrule on the first Sunday of Harvest were denounced as pagans by a preacher called William Gick, some seventy years ago; and how another man called Paric Beg, or Little Patrick, preaching to the crowds on Snaefell in milder terms, used to wind up the service with a collection, which appears to have proved a speedier method of reducing the dimensions of these meetings on the mountain tops. Be that as it may, they seem to have dwindled since then to comparative insignificance.