Manx Gaelic teacher, musician and composer, Annie Kissack is the fifth Manx writer to hold the title of Manx Bard. Each month she shares one of her poems with us, and explains what led her to write it.

The potential expansion of houses into the previously untouched fields around the Golden Mill in Castletown has been in the news recently.

Being brought up at a time of great building expansion in Onchan, I know too well, how quickly open fields are turned into vast estates.

You never get them back.

Under the digger go the long-held memories, the family identities, the farming practices, the old names, the histories, the flora and fauna, the traditions and the thousand and one subtle facets of a place.

It may well be the grown-up thing to accept it and move on but I can’t pretend I’m happy about it. Peel has succumbed. Will Castletown be next?

I lived in Castletown for a few years when I was in my twenties and I still go walking around the town and its environs fairly regularly.

It’s a unique sort of place.

You follow the river into the harbour, and the coast out to Scarlett and beyond, or over to the long-fingered stretch of Langness.

But look inland and an entirely different view rolls out before you.

These are the bright fields of the south rising slowly towards South Barrule; a vast, open landscape reminding you that this solid, planted little town is only a small part of the picture, the edge of a great landscape under a wide sky.

Town and country have always been linked of course and we have made and marked our landscapes. But do I want Castletown to spill out over its urban borders, to swallow up the lovely aspects of the silver river and the golden mill?

Of course not.

Rainbow at Castletown

The beauty of flat lands is the hills behind

And the sky above

And light spread thick like butter on the fields,

Or damp grey wool laid down on winter days.

I caught a rainbow the other week

While stopped at the traffic lights.

Was it a sign?

It had such a sky to itself, this rainbow,

Arching out beyond the flat fields towards Barrule,

Over the train track.

Such a sky it had to itself;

A huge, open lemon-grey

Surprise of a sky

With a clean feel to the air and

And a clean run of fields below.

And there was room to breathe out

And there was room to look to the hills

And nothing stood in the way of it,

Only the mill.

I glimpsed it, this rainbow, and it was fleeting

As rainbows are.

A man took out his camera as the lights changed

But it was too late.

by Annie Kissack

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