A Short History of Onchan

Ask any class of children at the primary schools in Onchan “How old is Onchan – how long have people lived here?” and the answers are many and varied. A hundred years is the common one then it slowly pushes back to about 1000 but even that falls short of a more realistic figure.

A stone age axe was found in the Cassa Field adjoining the Onchan Wetlands by Mr Lewin in the 1890s and this takes us back to 5000 years ago when the population would have lived in timber and straw huts huddled together within the marshland so as to be hidden from invading tribes.

There are other early examples of life in Onchan such as a burial ground found when the Ballachurry Park Estate was being built and many a first owner of houses in the lower part of Birch Hill found stone arrowheads and scrappers when trying top establish their gardens.

Arrowheads and Axe

When Christianity came to the island, often pagan sites were selected for the building of little churches, or keeills as they were known. This gave the people a link with the holy sites of the past but also prevented them from straying back to their old religious ways and practices for these sites were now replaced by Christian ones.

The area we know as Onchan today was just like the rest of the Isle of Man with stretches of open land, pockets of woodland, streams and marshland with no land divisions or place names. During the Viking reign it took on a more formal rôle being part of the Middle Sheading (a district charged to provide four ships crews of 26 oarsmen for the defence of the island). The more formal approach to Christianity saw the creation of parishes and the establishment of parish churches instead of several little keeills dotted across the countryside.

The land had been divided into treens and Onchan had nine of them, each at one time having a keeil of its own. One was selected to be the parish church and was either enlarged or rebuilt.

The keeills usually had a sod hedge around its oval boundary with a holy wall and a small house for the holy man, or cuddee as he was known.

As time passed, most of these structures, built with indigenous materials, fell into ruin and now only the basic outline of a keeill or just a pile of stones can be seen as at Ballakilmartin and at Upper Sulby Farm.

A typical Keeill
in the Sixth Century
Larger Image

The first parish church appears to have been dedicated to St Connaghyn (Manx Gaelic) which it has been suggested was the same man as the Irish Saint Conchend or St Christopher as he is known today. When the monks of Rushen Abbey produced the Manorial Roll in 1511 it was of course written in Latin and so we find the Parish of Onchan recorded as Parochia Sti Conchani. As the island became more the subject of the English language we find Kirk Conchan appearing then eventually this became the plain and simple word “Onchan”.

We need not dwell on names for too long but we must introduce another name at this stage – that of “Kiondroghad”.