It was once the jewel in the crown of Douglas.

The elegant Castle Mona Hotel was one of the finest buildings in the Isle of Man.

The Castle Mona was built in the early 1804 for the then governor of the island, the fourth Duke of Athol.

It became a hotel in 1831.

But in recent decades the 98-bedroom hotel lost a lot of its lustre until the point in 2006 when its owners shut its doors.

Where once there was a grand governor’s mansion of Scottish stone remarked upon for its dazzling whiteness, and surrounded by well-tended lawns and groves of trees, there is now a dirty grey, fenced-off embarrassment of a former hotel, hemmed in by other buildings.

In 2007, the Sefton Group paid £4m for the building and promised to restore it to its former glory in plans that the company - which got into financial difficulties and had to be bailed out by the government - never realised.

It was sold at auction and bought for £1.2m in the autumn of 2018.

The identity of its new owner was kept secret until an Isle of Man Examiner investigation revealed it was the Tevir Group.

A short while before that, the self-proclaimed ’His Majesty the Sole, King of Moraceae’, real name Ian-James Clanton, wrote his PhD thesis on the building and said he wanted to make his base for creating a ’futurist realm’ and 'meritocratic monarchy’.

The Castle Mona has undergone many alterations throughout its history.

The most significant being the addition of the accommodation and dining wing in the early 1960s, followed by the bowling alley extension in the early 1990s.

Many of the alterations that have occurred to the Castle Mona over its history have been intrusive, compromising the layout of the building and obscuring historical detailing.

Following Tevir’s purchase, maintenance and repair work was undertaken to the roof towards the end of that year.

Despite repeating this in 2019, further action is required to protect the building.

The works included in these applications follow a detailed assessment of the building and form the first phase of a long term strategy to carefully preserve and enhance it.

The elegant Castle Mona Hotel was one of the finest buildings in the Isle of Man.