Castletown, till 1862, was officially the capital of Man, and is still far the least "developed" of all its four principal towns. It is simply, in fact, a small, quiet country town, even less spoilt for visitors than the inland parts of Peel; though Peel, of course, exhibits, in its peerless St. Patrick's Isle, features of picturesqueness that we shall seek for in Castletown in vain. Castletown, no doubt, would be big and ugly if it could; and by making golf-links at Derby Haven it has certainly given hostages to fortune. After all, there is nothing to see in the place save Castle Rushen, which is principally keep, with a narrow ward, and an _enceinte_ wall and ditch that surround the whole. So narrow a ward, and a keep so disproportionately big, can be matched perhaps only at Middleham, in Yorkshire--once the home of the "King-Maker"--where the keep is late Norman, and the _enceinte_ fourteenth century. At Castletown, it is asserted, no part of the existing structure dates back earlier than the fourteenth, or at earliest the thirteenth, century; though the castle itself is said to have been founded--the account is perhaps mythical--by King Guthred the Dane in 947. The keep, moreover, though so-called in all the guide-books, is not really a keep at all--not a single solid tower, that is, in the sense of Middleham Castle, or, to take more familiar instances, in the sense of Rochester, Dover, or London. On the contrary it is really a minute inner ward surrounded by an _enceinte_ of quite disproportionate height. Formerly, under the rule of the house of Stanley, it served, like the Tower and Windsor Castle, for castle and palace alike; after that the place was a prison; and now it is dismantled, save for a handful of rooms, some of which shelter the Manx Museum. Most of the apartments are gloomy enough, and one is glad to escape from them back into the sunlight: the great slabs of slate, however, that serve for floor or ceiling--some of them measure 12 feet in length--are surely without parallel elsewhere. The drawing-room, which is the biggest room in the castle, has now an interesting collection of Manx antiquities--_e.g._, old rushlight-holders, and the ancient Bishop's mace; but the object that strikes one most with amazement is the splendid skeleton of an Irish elk--an animal, of course, that has long since been extinct--which was found some sixteen years ago in a marl-pit near St. John's. This is said to be complete, and measures about 10 feet across the antlers--sufficient indication of its general gigantic size.