Torbay is the area name for Torquay, Paignton and Brixham, and Broadsands chambered tomb stands near the coast between Paignton and Brixham.
The following article concerns a grisly legend about an ancient gallows site on the ring road that runs along high ground around the western outskirts of Torquay and Paignton.
To quote from the Herald Express online:
"The grisly history of Torbay's Gallows Gate
JUST by the roundabout at the top of Torquay’s Hamelin Way on the A380, at around 495 feet above sea level, is a small area called Gallows Gate.
In his latest article for http://www.thisissouthdevon.co.uk, local historian Dr Kevin Dixon explains the origins of a familiar landmark with a dark history.
As the name suggests, this was known as a place of public execution. Gallows were located at the edges of towns, by roads, or on hilltops, where victims could be seen. They were often permanent to act as a deterrent and a symbol of the power of justice. The French word for gallows, ‘potence’, comes from the Latin word potentia, meaning ‘power’.
Gallows rarely survive in the archaeological record, but they can be traced in place names. The Anglo Saxon name for gallows is ‘galga’, and gibbet is ‘gealga’, so ‘Gally’ would also indicate a place of execution. ‘Forches’, deriving from the Latin ‘furcus’, an old term for gallows, would indicate that Forches Cross near Newton Abbot was another edge-of-town location.
The site is on an ancient Ridgeway and where the four parishes of Cockington, Marldon, Kingskerswell and St Marychurch meet.
In 1436 the Cockington Manor Court referred to a ‘stope’, usually defined as a gibbet or whipping post which could be at Gallows Gate. A Marldon Tithe Map of 1839 shows a 3 cornered field called Gallows Gate Field. To the south is Dada Croft. ‘Daddy’ is Saxon for ‘dead’, so it’s reasonable to see the small enclosed field as a place reserved for the remains of those who died in the immediate area.
However, it’s generally thought that the original site of the gallows was 170 meters to the north of Gallows Gate, at Kingsland, the highest point and where the reservoir now is.
The Haytor Hundred is recorded as being held at Kingsland (the King’s Land). This would have seen gatherings of men called to fight and hold open air courts, as well as providing a good lookout for sighting hostile ships in the Bay. The partition of Devon into Hundreds dates from King Alfred (871-901) and so this could mean that the area had a thousand year history as a place of execution.
One suggestion is that the gallows were moved in the 1820s when public opinion began to turn against disorderly public hangings which could be seen for miles around.
In July 1964, and again in early 1965, deep chasms appeared near the summit of Kingsland Hill. The Water Board investigated and found two passages 12 meters below the surface and several hundred meters long. Fragments of bone and wood were found, indicating that at one time the pits were open.
It’s worth noting how widely the death penalty was used in medieval and early modern England, before the development of the prison system. During the reign of Henry VIII, for example, 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed.
By 1820, there were 160 crimes punishable by death, including shoplifting, petty theft, or cutting down trees in a public place.
Gallows Gate also had a gibbet, where executed criminals could be left to rot. Up to the late seventeenth century, live gibbeting also took place, in which the criminal was placed in a metal cage and left to die of thirst. Gibbeting became common in the mid-eighteenth century due to a perceived increase in murders, and was regularised in England by the Murder Act 1752. This Act stipulated that "in no case whatsoever shall the body of any murderer be suffered to be buried", the cadaver was either to be publicly dissected or left "hanging in chains".
The practice ended in 1832 but it took a few decades before the last gibbet was removed.
As murderers and suicides were denied Christian burial, the unconsecrated burial grounds near execution sites were prime candidates for ghosts and were avoided at night. To avoid any rising of the dead, bodies were often dismembered and buried with a wooden stake driven through, and left sticking out of the ground as a warning. These methods were employed in the prehistoric period and in later Pagan and Christian times. An Act of Parliament finally prohibited staking in 1823.
At Gallows Gate there’s a plaque which tells the legend of a man who stole a sheep which he tried to carry away slung by a rope on his back. In getting over a high gate, the carcase fell on side and the thief the other; the stolen sheep hanged the thief. A gate remains as a commemoration of the legend.
However, variants of the same story can be found in other places. In Devon alone there are nine, with five of these found on Dartmoor. The difference is that, instead of a gate, the rope is caught around a rock - hence the 'hanging stones' across the Moor.
The story seems to reflect the importance of sheep farming. In 1741 a law specifically defined the death penalty for sheep stealing and throughout England it was often meted out. Across Britain hanging stones are to be found on parish boundaries and are associated with nearby gallows.
One possibility is that there may have been standing stones at Gallows Gate. In an inventory of 1654, the area was known as Stauntor, Stontor or Stantor, meaning ‘stone hill or eminence’. This could indicate that the original site had a monolith or “some such monument to a prehistoric chieftain”. A Neolithic chambered tomb or passage grave is not too far away at Broadsands, and Bronze Age artifacts have been found at Kingsland.
If this is correct, the Gallows Gate area could have had significance for local people for thousands of years. The physical boundaries that prehistoric people carved into the landscape and marked with standing stones had deep symbolic meanings. Boundaries served as ‘liminal places’ where people gathered to either reinforce the separation between the worlds or to permeate it for religious or magical purposes. Parish boundaries seem to function as liminal places, and a study of supposedly haunted roads found that a significant number cut through these sites.
So, along with Gallows Gate being a place of execution, it also appears to have been important for other purposes, and there is this intriguing suggestion that the intersection of four parishes has been significant for local people since prehistoric times."
End of quote.
The last three paragraphs have some interesting comments about possible prehistoric sites, and there were useful refs to the meanings of some old place-names.
'Dada Croft' and 'Daddy' [surely that didn't mean 'dead'?!!], reminded me of 'Doda' as in 'Doda [or Doda's] Well' at Coffinswell, between there and Newton Abbot.
[I copied the whole article here so that some silly comments added to the online version could be omitted.]
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