e calf being burnt. The
owner bears an English name, but his family has long been settled in
Man. The farmer's explanation to my informant was that the calf was
burnt to secure luck for the rest of the herd, some of which were
threatening to die. My informant thought there was absolutely nothing
the matter with them, except that they had too little to eat. Be that as
it may, the one calf was sacrificed as a burnt-offering to secure luck
for the rest of the cattle. Let me here also quote Mr. Moore's note in
his _Manx Surnames_, p. 184, on the place name _Cabbal yn Oural Losht_,
or the Chapel of the Burnt Sacrifice. 'This name,' he says, 'records a
circumstance which took place in the nineteenth century, but which, it
is to be hoped, was never customary in the Isle of Man. A farmer, who
had lost a number of his sheep and cattle by murrain, burned a calf as a
propitiatory offering to the Deity on this spot, where a chapel was
afterwards built. Hence the name.' Particulars, I may say, of time,
place, and person could be easily added to Mr. Moore's statement,
excepting, perhaps as to the deity in question; on that point I have
never been informed, but Mr. Moore is probably right in the use of the
capital _d_, as the sacrificer is, according to all accounts, a highly
devout Christian. One more instance: an octogenarian woman, born in the
parish of Bride, and now living at Kirk Andreas, saw, when she was a
'lump of a girl' of ten or fifteen years of age, a live sheep being
burnt in a field in the parish of Andreas, on May-day, whereby she meant
the first of May reckoned according to the Old Style. She asserts very
decidedly that it was _son oural_, 'as a sacrifice,' as she put it, and
'for an object to the public': those were her words when she expressed
herself in English. Further, she made the statement that it was a custom
to burn a sheep on old May-day for a sacrifice. I was fully alive to the
interest of this evidence, and cross-examined her so far as her age
allows of it, and I find that she adheres to her statement with all
firmness."[756]

[By burning a bewitched animal you compel the witch to appear.]

But Manxmen burn beasts when they are dead as well as when they are
alive; and their reasons for burning the dead animals may help us to
understand their reasons for burning the living animals. On this subject
I will again quote Sir John Rhys: "When a beast dies on a farm, of
course it dies, according to the old-fashio