{"id":9967,"date":"2021-03-19T10:46:56","date_gmt":"2021-03-19T10:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brentorpc.org.uk\/?page_id=9967"},"modified":"2021-03-19T10:46:56","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T10:46:56","slug":"gibbett-hill","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.brentorpc.org.uk\/?page_id=9967","title":{"rendered":"Gibbet Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gibbett Hill from South Brentor<\/p><\/div>\n

Much of Gibbet Hill \u00a0lies outside the parish of Brentor but its position on the east side of the parish, adjacent to West Blackdown, \u00a0means that it is a favourite place for many Brentor residents.<\/span><\/p>\n

This article is part of a larger article ‘<\/span>The King Way: Part 2 \u2013 Blackdown to Nodden Gate<\/em>‘ published in March 2021 on the ‘A Walk in English Weather’<\/em> website.\u00a0 It is reproduced here by permission of the author, Sharon Gedye.\u00a0\u00a0 You can see the full article by clicking here.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Gibbet Hill does not lie on the King Way but dominates it and I sense its history is intertwined with this postal route. In order to explain I am going to explore a bit of gibbeting history.<\/p>\n

Gibbeting was the act of hanging people in chains or in a metal cage. It was used to distinguish the death penalty used for any one of about 220 ordinary crimes from those of the most heinous. Gibbeting was used for murder, robbery, arson and riot. Criminals guilty of these \u2018worst of the worst\u2019 offences could also be sentenced to post-mortem dissection. Eighty per cent of felons were dealt with this way, but gibbeting accounted for the other 20%. Between the 1720s and 1830s this translated into about 375 men (Tarlow and Dyndor, 2015). Spread over the whole of the country, that isn\u2019t very many. Gibbeting was therefore a relatively rare practice.<\/p>\n

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The iron cage to hold the gibbeted man (image Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

Before the 18th C criminals could be gibbetted alive but in the 1700s they were executed first and hung in a cage already dead. The chained or caged body would be transported to the gibbet site and raised on a very high pole of about 30ft tall. Bodies would be left to gradually decompose and gibbets were designed with enough movement to allow the cage to creak and clank as it swung in the wind. The lofty altitude and noises were thus purposefully designed to bring attention to the fate of the criminal and the importance of justice. The gibbet could hang for many years and so, whilst gibbeting might be rare, its persistence in the landscape gave it a lengthy presence.<\/p>\n

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Bleak trig point on Gibbet Hill<\/p><\/div>\n

Given the rarity of gibbeting, why is there a Gibbet Hill located here in this remote part of the Dartmoor periphery? Tarlow and Dyndow (2015) state three key reasons for the siting of gibbets:<\/p>\n