Hall Caine's impressions of his life at Ballavolley are vivid the old preacher at the church, the drinking-bouts of "jough"-beer by the gallon amongst the villagers, the donkey rides upon the curragh.

Hall Caine has no remembrance of the first years which he spent in Liverpool, and his earliest recollections are of life in his grandmother's cottage of Ballavolley, Ballaugh, in the Isle of Man, a house set in a wooded plain surrounded by high mountains which glow, here yellow with the gorse, there purple with the heather.

It is in its rare beauty a spot than which, for a poet's childhood, no fitter could be found. The Ballavolley cottage was a typical Manx cottage. On one side of the porch was the parlor, which also served as a dairy, redolent of milk and bright with rare old Derby china.