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.
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