Just outside of Castletown, Balladoole is one of the Isle of Man’s most impressive ancient monuments.
Balladoole has been the site of many excavations that have revealed a number of significant finds including prehistoric flints, Bronze Age burials, Iron Age earthworks and early Christian lintel graves.
A Viking boat burial which dates back to between 850-950 AD was discovered in 1945 by a German refugee and a team from the internment camps based on the Island. The group were originally looking for an Iron Age hill fort but found the burial instead, lying within early Christian lintel graves, which contained a 36ft long Viking ship and the bodies of a man and woman.
In 1918, an ancient Keeill chapel dating between 900AD and 1000AD and a Bronze Age grave dating to 10000 BC were also discovered at the Balladoole site in an area now known as Chapel Hill.
Information boards are provided next to each section of the site and for more information on the history of the site as well as dioramas of the burial and artifacts from the excavation, visit the Viking Gallery in the Manx Museum in Douglas.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.