A Short History of Onchan

There were however a few houses close to the church, one for the vicar as you would expect and one or two others occupied by farm workers and a blacksmith. What we know today as the Onchan Wetlands is in fact merely a marsh where a mill dam used to be but excavations for foundations on part of the Lakeside development showed peat for up to ten feet thick indicating thousands of years of marsh. The road we know as Church Road today was once a track that passed through the marsh in order to reach the old church and the higher ground.

In the earliest of times a primitive bridge of brushwood and logs would have been built. The Manx Gaelic word for bridge being “droghad” and the cluster of houses around the bridge gained the name Kiondroghad which literally translated means “bridgehead”. The earliest written record of Kiondroghad was in the Manorial Roll of 1643. It was very small, even hard to gain the title of hamlet.

The Butt, Onchan which formed the original village of Kiondroghad.
A sketch by Nancy Corkish based on a photograph of about 1860

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Incidentally the Cassa Field upon which a modern group of houses have been built has been the name of a plot of land in this area from time immemorial. It has been linked with an Irish Gaelic word meaning a wicker causeway thus reinforcing the theories over the name of the village. The name Kiondroghad still exists in the northern part of the island.

The name Kiondroghad appeared on the 1841 census but not the subsequent one a decade later. Many conveyances and title deeds however continued to refer to the old name of Conchan when Onchan was generally applied equally to the village and the parish.