The history of Bodmin

Prisoners of war built a jail of separate cells

Bodmin Jail is a former prison on the edge of Bodmin Moor, now run as a hotel and museum. Sir John Call, a military engineer, designed it using the reform ideas of John Howard, who later visited and approved of the work. Building began in the early 1770s and finished in 1779. French and Spanish prisoners of war from the Napoleonic wars cut and hauled 20,000 tonnes of granite from the moor to build it. Each inmate had a separate cell instead of a shared room. It had baths, an infirmary, and its own wing for women. Liquor was banned inside.

The jail's first executions came on 1 September 1802. William Lee and John Vanstone were hanged for a robbery committed that February. Over the next hundred years, more than fifty people died on the gallows here, almost all of them in public, watched by crowds that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands. Eight of the condemned were women.

Women went to the gallows for arson and poison

Among the condemned was Elizabeth Osborne, a twenty-year-old servant hanged in 1813 for setting fire to corn belonging to the employer who had dismissed her. Sarah Polgrean went to the gallows in 1820 for poisoning her husband with arsenic. In 1840, brothers William Lightfoot and James Lightfoot were hanged for murdering merchant Nevell Norway, before a crowd of 25,000 people. Selina Wadge followed in 1878, hanged for drowning her young son after her lover suggested the boy stood in the way of their marriage. She is said to climb the gallows stairs still, weeping, asking forgiveness of every mother who visits.

A navy wing and a last hanging at Bodmin

The public hangings had already moved inside the jail's walls by 1862, out of sight of the crowds that once gathered by the thousand. William Hampton, twenty-four, was the last person hanged here, on 20 July 1909, for killing his girlfriend. William Marwood had developed the "long drop" method of hanging at Bodmin Jail decades earlier, a technique that spread to prisons across the country.

By then the jail's role was already changing. Imprisonment for debt ended in England in 1869, and the Royal Navy took over the empty debtors' wing for its own men. The Admiralty formally took charge of that wing the following year and kept it for thirty-five years. The women's prison closed in 1911, its last inmates sent to Plymouth. The last male prisoner walked out in July 1916.

The Domesday Book sheltered inside an emptying jail

During the First World War, the empty jail took on an unlikely job. Some of Britain's state papers and records, including the Domesday Book, were stored inside its walls for safekeeping in 1918 and 1919. The Royal Navy gave up its wing in 1922, and five years later Bodmin Jail closed for good. Cornwall has had no prison of its own since.

Explosives failed and the jail stood as a ruin

With no further use for the buildings, crews stripped the roof and tried to demolish what remained. The walls proved too strong for the explosives of the time, so much of the structure stood open to the weather for decades, slowly becoming a ruin on the edge of the moor. A local family bought the abandoned site in 2004 and began turning it into a visitor attraction.

Restoration uncovered Britain's only surviving execution pit

Restoration work in 2005 uncovered something nobody had seen in generations: an execution shed built in 1888, complete with its original drop. It is the only working execution pit still surviving in the United Kingdom. In 2003, before the shed came to light, the ghost-hunting television show Most Haunted filmed an episode here. Medium Derek Acorah claimed to be possessed by a spirit called Kreed Kafer, a name a parapsychologist on the crew later admitted inventing as a test. It is an anagram of "Derek Faker." A Russian entrepreneur bought the site in 2015, and developers set about converting it into both a museum and a hotel.

Old cell blocks became a seventy-room hotel

Bodmin Jail reopened in 2021 as a seventy-room hotel built inside the old cell blocks, alongside a museum and gift shop. Guided tours run through the original cells and the administration block, and paranormal walks lead guests through the darkened wings with ouija boards, chasing the same stories that have followed the jail for a century. The jail also appeared as a filming location for the television series Poldark.

A short walk from the jail, Scarlett's Well drew pilgrims from the fourteenth century onward, people who believed its water could cure them. The crowds grew so large that local justices eventually cordoned off the well to control the crush. Its granite surround, built around the 1600s, still stands at the site.