• Maritime History
• Manx Monarchs
• Sites
• Ancient Burial Sites
• Castles
• Peel Castle
• The Armoury
• The Bowling Green
• St German's Cathedral
• St Patrick's Chapel
• St Patrick's Church
• The Gatehouse
• The Guard House
• The Half Moon Battery
• The Hall
• A Kitchen
• The Lord's House
• The Magazine
• The Moddey Dhoo
• The New Battery
• The Pagan Lady
• The People of St Patrick's Isle
• The Postern Gate
• The Round Battery
• The Round Tower
• Toilet
• The Wall
• The Warwick Tower
• Ceremonial Sites
• Churches and Monasteries
• Forts
• Keeills
• Stone Crosses
• Stone Circles
• Towers
• Timelines
• Vikings

Peel Castle - The People of St Patrick's Isle

The first known visitors to St Patrick's Isle date from the Mesolithic period, or the middle Stone Age, around 6000BC. Evidence of their visits to the isle takes the form of tiny chips of flint, used to barb harpoons and arrows. A rare flint axe of this date was also recovered. These people were the hunter-gatherers whose lifestyle was nomadic, and the isle was part of their annual cycle of campsites. This was long before the time of farming or raising cattle. These people wandered wherever the fancy and the hunting led them. They stopped to camp for a while, and when the urge took them they moved onto fishing, gathering wild plants and berries, and hunting animals.

However, with the advent of farming around 4000 BC, the location of St Patrick's Isle, cut off from the main island by the tides, meant that it was too inconvenient for settlement and so, in the centuries between 5000 BC and 500 BC there is no evidence of occupation on the isle.

From about 500 BC though, there is evidence of increasing unrest over the whole of northwest Europe and the isolation and inaccessibility of sites such as St. Patrick's Isle, which were previously seen as disadvantages, were now seen as their most desirable features.

It was from this period that the look of the isle started to change. Evidence shows that circular structures were built. They were probably huts, and excavations show that they were replaced many times and were probably there over a period from the 8th century BC, through the Iron Age into the Christian era. Loom-weights and spindle-whorls were found, indicating that the isle had become home to a farming community who had settled there for several generations. There was one other unusual find. A flea. In the sludge surrounding a buried wooden post dating from 450BC, several human fleas were discovered. This was an exciting moment for the archaeologists!

The earliest previously known human flea was reputedly brought to Britain by the Romans in 100 AD, but the excavations on St. Patrick's Isle unearthed the remains of a human flea which lived at least 500 years before the Roman invasion. An interesting first for the Isle of Man!