Gallows Hill – The Hangman Cut Steps in the Trunk

Anybody who liked my WW piece ‘An Alvediston Horror Story’ might be interested in this piece about Gallows Hill, Alvediston. Both accounts are about bodies left to rot. If you were squeamish about John Gawen’s body being dragged out of his tomb in the church by anti-Catholic villagers in 1604 and exposed in a meadow, you may want to give a miss to this account of the Gallows above the village. It has been called ‘Gallows Hill’ from at least the time of John Gawen but it wasn’t until 1820 that maps had a scale big enough to show the name. It only came into its own as a landmark with a body swinging from it in the stage coach era (1660 – 1787) when the Drove was turnpiked as the main road from Salisbury to Shaftesbury and stage coaches bowled along it in both directions.  Before that, the only people to see the gallows were the drovers driving cattle towards Salisbury, packwaggons and pilgrims who had been using it since 1448. Those hanged there before the 1700s are lost to history and when the road was transferred to the valley in 1787 and coaches took the lower route, no more top-decks full of passengers swung their heads in its direction and the drove fell silent again. 

Just as Catholic persecution produced the monstrous scene in the meadow, so troubled times led to the heyday of the gallows. The poverty of the agricultural labourer had caused the Swing Riots in Hindon and machine breaking in the 1820s and although none of the Swing rioters were hanged at Alvediston there must have been many young husbands who stole a sheep to feed their families and ended up there. The criminals it was designed for – and why it was placed in view of the Drove as a warning  – were coach robbers or those who robbed drovers and travellers during the hundreds of years before the coaches. But it would be wrong to see the coach robbers as storybook highwaymen in masks, riding Black Bess and kissing the hands of women passengers. No famous highwayman ended up on the Alvediston gallows. Many of them were old soldiers discharged from the Napoleonic Wars with no work – hard-bitten desperate men who couldn’t afford a horse and probably did their robbing on foot. 

In my WW piece on the Hindon Madhouse I said that it was small and second-rate compared with bigger asylums like Salisbury’s and the same goes for Alvediston’s gallows compared to bigger ones like that at Winchester. Even the Salisbury Journal reports more hangings at Winchester than on our own smaller version on the downs. Winchester’s gallows was a towering pillar of wood with a cross-bar,  Alvediston’s was more like something out of the Wild West where cowboys had swung a rope over a branch. Is it too wild to suggest it may literally have started like that – enraged drovers or carters stringing up someone who’d robbed them and establishing it as a punishment spot? At any rate, at some date in the 1500s or 1600s the end tree of a row of Scots Pines growing on a burial mound on top of a small hill in view of the Drove, was chosen. Notches for the hangman to climb it were cut in the trunk and a fourteen-foot branch that stuck out against the surrounding landscape was chosen as the hanging bough. The pine itself had probably grown from a cone scattered by drovers who were in the habit of marking spots along the droves with clumps of pines.   

Rather than just reading about it, it was time to see it. So I got on my bike and tackled for a second time the stiff climb from Ansty up onto the Drove, dragging my wife’s and daughter’s bikes with me. The first time had been to check out the horrible Gawen story and reaching the top had been followed by a long glide down the other side into Alvediston. This time we turned right at the top onto the Drove, facing Shaftesbury and chained our bikes in a small wood. We looked for but couldn’t find the rusty staple said to have been driven into a tree by one of the ‘highwaymen’ to hitch his horse to.

On a hot day it’s hard to believe the glaring chalk track full of bumps and hollows once supported coaches dashing past and that it was actually called The Shaftesbury Coach Road. It must have been like riding on air, losing count of the villages far below on both sides.  The ride must have been made even more hair raising because a mile after the Gallows the coach road ends in what is effectively a precipice and plunges down White Sheet Hill. One can almost hear the shouts of horror from the top deck as it approached and the only way a coach could get down was by chaining a heavy iron shoe called a skidpan to one of the wheels so that instead of rolling it dragged and by training the horses to sit back on their haunches and slide.

We were so high we almost missed Alvediston. The hill should be next. Soon a dark little bump looking a bit sinister appeared on the left about half a mile from the Drove. Leaving my wife and kid, I climbed down the side of the Drove, crossed some scrub, empty apart from the dried-up disc of a dewpond, and got up onto it.  Just like books said, the site was raised in the landscape by being on an ancient burial mound but the pines, which are known to have existed as late as 1937, were gone apart from a stump at one end which may or may not be the hanging tree. The country writer Ralph Whitlock remembers seeing it as late as the mid-1950s and confirms the notches cut in the trunk and that a branch eight feet from the ground, pointing west, was scarred by the ropes and chains of many executions.  He also says that in 1927 an archaeologist exploring the barrow, found many C18th bottles buried under the tree, surviving from wakes held round it by the victim’s friends. Other sources say that numerous skeletons have been found buried in the sides of the Drove during maintenance work.  And that it was the law that bodies should be buried at the foot of the gallows or along the highway boundary.

I don’t normally get spooked by sites where something awful has happened and I can’t pretend the gallows site made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I felt nothing as nasty as the shadow that swept across the meadow in Alvediston – just the vague feeling that ‘something had happened there’ and a dull, empty feeling that it had happened again and again and again. 

Anybody who’s read my previous stuff for WW knows I approach folklore-laden subjects cautiously and do a debunk if I can to get at what REALLY happened. Alvediston was a small site as gallows go but it has attracted some myths. It’s a fact that although executions were probably sporadic, they built up over the years, perhaps on a structure predating the tree. The first thing to get straight – and it’s a shock – is that in the C18th coaching days when it was in its heyday, NOBODY WAS HANGED ON IT, i.e hanged to death.  It was a gibbet – not a gallows. What happened is that in 1752 the Murder Act was passed to add an extra layer of horror to the death penalty.  No murderers could have Christian burial. They were to be hanged in county gaols like Fisherton in Salisbury where their dead bodies were encased in cages knocked up by blacksmiths out of iron hoops and taken in carts to prominent spots and gibbeted – i.e hanged in the cage. A few news accounts in the Salisbury Journal detail executions in the gaol, briefly mentioning that the body was ‘sent to be hung in chains in the parish of Alvediston.’  Out of decency, women could not be gibbeted and their bodies were sent for public dissection instead.

Often the body was coated in pitch (tar) so it could hang preserved for weeks, months and even years. There are heartbreaking stories of how people were hanged on the public gallows on the corner of Wilton and Devizes Road in Salisbury with local militia holding back their screaming loved ones. On top of that, any family who tried to reclaim a body from a gibbet was severely punished. However, even the most loving family must have hesitated to reclaim the tarred object, pecked by birds, that their loved one had become. And even less inclined when it began to fall to pieces, I think it disposes of the myth of the Friends’ Wake for the same reason.

What about the bottles buried round the tree?  Ralph Whitlock mentions them but only as hearsay.  The archaeologist R.C Clay excavating in 1920 found ONE ginger beer bottle made by Wadworths Brewery in Devizes, but the brewery didn’t open till 1885, a hundred years after the gallows stopped being used. Clearly, a walker or labourer had quenched his thirst then just hurled it away. Admittedly, he also said he excavated glass fragments mixed with prehistoric beads but these were from a prehistoric layer and were probably just smashed beads.  And that soft drink bottle that debunks the beery farewell round the gallows also debunks one of the myths of harvest time in Wiltshire, – that of men and women labourers flopping down in the heat of the day and getting drunk on cider. In fact, the chief customers for Wadworth’s soft drinks were Wiltshire farm labourers, testified to by the number of anti-drink chapels dotted about.

 What about the ‘custom of burying bodies round the foot of the gibbet or along the highway boundaries which have been uncovered by maintenance work?’  The Salisbury Journal contains no account of a dig at the Gallows finding a body or of road menders finding skeletons on the sides of the Drove. The ONLY skeleton found was one unearthed in the dried-up dew pond I mentioned, when men were first digging it in the 1870s. In contrast, thirty skeletons uncovered in the 1930s when a garage was being built where Fisherton Gallows stood in Salisbury.

So where are the bodies?  It is theorised that they are scattered in shallow graves round the many barrows in the area but why hasn’t quarrying or ploughing exposed them?  Much of the active hanging history associated with the gibbet pre-dates newspapers so we have no idea how many hangings took place and from what date. When newspapers start we know there was the very active gibbet at Winchester with lots of executions but it doesn’t mean Alvediston’s was busy too. Tarred bodies lasted a long time. Could there have been just two or three a year? Or even only one?

Gibbets surround themselves with creepy stories but the one on Gallows Hill doesn’t seem to have produced any ghosts. One of the things gibbets share with inn signs is creaking in the wind. The irony of the one on Gallows Hill is that it was so far from the Drove that nobody heard it. Stagecoach passengers craned their necks to see it and got a shiver as they passed but the gibbet creaked to itself. Banished to the limits of the parish boundary, the souls on it were utterly outcast. Just as it was too far away to send a sound wave, perhaps it was also too far to send a ghost.  

When the coach road was replaced in 1787 and coaches switched to the lower valley road (now the A30), the drovers who had been pushed to the sides of the road with their cattle by coaches came back into their own. Some of them may well have been the descendants of the men who in my imagined scenario, started the whole thing off by throwing that rope over a branch to mete out justice. Gibbeting went on after the coaches stopped but Gallows Hill had stopped being used by the early 1800s. People had become squeamish about ‘hanging in chains’ and it was formally abolished by the ‘Hanging in Chains Act’ of 1834.

David Aneurin Morgan