On the evening of 27 December 1852 a fierce wind drove the 160-ton brig Lily into the Sound. She was bound from Liverpool for Ambriz in west Africa, her hold full of cotton, cloth, rum, cannon, firearms and gunpowder. She struck the rocks at Kitterland. The master, two ship's boys and the cook were lost in the wrecking, and the carpenter was killed by the falling mast. Local men from Port St Mary rowed out and pulled the rest of the crew off the rocks. Then, because there was a fortune in the hold and because that is what the men of Rushen Parish had always done with wrecks on their shore, thirty of them went back aboard to salvage what they could. Among them were fishermen, carpenters, shipwrights, a grocer. They were neighbours, brothers, cousins, fathers. They had children at home in Port St Mary and Port Erin waiting to be told what the new year would look like.

It came at first light. The gunpowder in the hold detonated. The blast was heard eighteen miles away. In Douglas, sixteen miles to the north-east, houses shook on their foundations. Burning bales of cotton flew hundreds of feet into the air and sailed across the Sound like meteors. A spar from the brig was found driven feet-deep into a field at The Howe, well inland. Debris rained across the parish of Rushen. Twenty-nine men were dead, most of the salvage party along with the surviving crew and two customs officers. The bodies of friends and brothers came home in pieces, or did not come home at all. Word reached Port St Mary first, then ran the lanes to Port Erin, then up the hills to Cregneash. There was hardly a household in the south of the Island that did not know one of the dead.

On the Isle of Man, what happened on Kitterland is not a footnote in a maritime register. It is a wound the parish still touches. The disaster shaped a generation of Manx widows, who organised what we would today recognise as one of the earliest community-funded relief schemes on the Island. The names of the men who died are still known in Rushen. John Wright, who wrote a book titled The Explosion That Shook Port St Mary, gathered the stories down to the surname of every man lost. A memorial stone on the wall of Rushen Parish Church carries the date. When children at Port St Mary's primary school study local history, they learn it not as folklore but as something that happened to people whose great-great-grandchildren still live a hundred yards from where the news first arrived.

There is a much older story that the Manx tell about the islet, and it has nothing to do with gunpowder. According to legend, the islet takes its name from Baron Kitter, a Norwegian nobleman who hunted the Calf so relentlessly that he wiped out all its game. The people of Mann, fearing he would turn next on the cattle of the mainland, sought help from the witches of the island. One day, while Kitter was on the Calf, his cook fell asleep, and the witch Ada threw a spell on his pot. It boiled over. His castle at Barrule caught fire. Kitter saw the smoke from across the water, leapt into his boat to row home, and drowned in the Sound. The story is older than the wreck, but the choice to tell it again and again about this particular islet, this particular stretch of water, says something about what the people of Rushen have always believed Kitterland is for: a place where the sea takes back what it is owed.

Manx National Heritage owns it now, and Kitterland is wildlife only. Seals haul out on its lower rocks. Guillemots, razorbills and shags nest on the cliffs. The currents in the Sound run hard between Kitterland and the Calf, and the lifeboats from Port St Mary and Port Erin still treat this water with respect. From the air, the islet looks like nothing much: a long, low slab of rock, green at one end with thin turf, white at the other with gull droppings, ringed by white water on a fresh day. The brig is long gone. The men are long gone. But the bay south of Port St Mary is one of the quieter places in the British Isles to think about what the sea costs the people who live with it.