From Ramsey the visitor may travel seventeen miles south to Douglas, returning thence to Peel, if he like, by railway. At the very beginning, however, a digression should be made to Kirk Maughold and St. Maughold's Head, immediately beyond it. Kirk Maughold, beyond question, is one of the pleasantest villages in Man, and certainly for the archaeologist a shrine of the first importance. Even the little church, in this case, has some touches of mediaevalism (thirteenth-century lancets) that redeem it from the general charge of Manx ecclesiological dulness. The churchyard in which it stands--like that of Adel, in Yorkshire--is quite disproportionately large, containing, it is said, nearly four acres. For the sake of its church alone, however, no one would come to Kirk Maughold: the magnet that attracts one is the collection of crosses in the churchyard, now studiously protected in a picturesque shelter. These, of course, are mostly pre-Conquest--the term, it is true, in strictness has no real application to Man, but at any rate it serves roughly to indicate a style, if not to disclose a period. Man is as distinguished for the number and variety of its old crosses as its far away sister, Cornwall. Not that Cornish and Manx crosses have any close affinity--they belong, no doubt, to wholly different schools of ancient Celtic art. Cornish crosses, in particular, like those in Pembrokeshire and Iona, are generally cut more or less to the cross-shape (though it may be only a wheel cross), whereas those of Man are merely carved in relief on a slab of rectangular slate. "The erect cross-slabs," says the late Mr. J. Romilly Allen, "are, with a few unimportant exceptions, peculiar to Scotland and the Isle of Man. They are probably older than the free-standing crosses, because the erect cross-slabs are not treated architecturally (as the high crosses of Ireland are), but resemble more nearly than anything else ornamented pages from the Celtic illuminated MSS. directly translated to stone with hardly any modification whatever to suit the requirements of the new material to which the decoration was applied." "There is no district," says Mr. P. M. C. Kermode, in his beautiful volume on "Manx Crosses," of so small an area which can boast of so great a number of monuments of this class, extending over such a lengthy period, and having such a variety of interest--Ogam, Latin, and Runic inscriptions, Celtic art with its Scandinavian applications and development, Christian symbols and pagan myths. Altogether, according to this same authority, the island has one hundred and sixteen old crosses, extending over a period of six centuries, forty-five of which may be called Scandinavian and seventy-one pre-Scandinavian. Not one of the seventeen old parishes is wholly without an example, though Ballaugh, Lezayre, and Patrick have only one each. Kirkmichael, however, has ten; whilst Maughold has actually thirty-seven--by far the biggest collection in the island.