Truth or Legend: The Strange Case of Gallow's Hill

Since the dawn of time, Nottingham has been a reminder that buzzing cities still exist in the Midlands. From the early 60s, Notts greeted travellers from the south with eight cooling towers – once an ideal indicator for drivers to begin immediately turning off the M1. Northern travellers, however, were once greeted with more threatening images of death and decay.

Up until the early 1800s, these tired travellers from Manchester and York were first introduced to the City of Caves via two upright beams and one single transverse beam. To them this may have appeared to be a rather direct warning for anyone looking for trouble, but to locals it was known as Gallows Hill. 

Criminals belonging to the county were executed here; taken from the County Hall (now the Justice Museum), through the city centre to Clumber Street, up Milton Street and finally creeping up Mansfield Road to their final destination.

The last-ever execution carried out on Gallows Hill took place on 2 April 1827. The culprit was a man known as William Wells who was sentenced to death for highway robbery. Nowadays, we simply refer to this heinous crime as toll road charges. 

Before these criminals met their impending demise, the custom arose that the landlord of The Nag’s Head would provide them with a last drink of Nottingham’s finest ale. According to old scriptures and Facebook posts dating back to the 1800s, one man chose not to sup upon his ale before his departure from this earth and instead chose to meet his maker whilst being stone cold sober. A messenger came scurrying up the hill to explain his innocence, but unfortunately for him he had already been executed. This, therefore, is presumably why it is the Nottingham tradition to always finish your pint. Or so I’ve been told.

Whilst Gallows Hill is but a distant cause for dread amongst those travellers from the north, today standing in its place, Rock Cemetery (also known as Church Cemetery) is now a more socially acceptable reminder of death. Stretching over thirteen acres of land, and dotted with lofty stone angels, grand tombstones and ivy-covered crypts, the cemetery contains scattered war graves of 81 Commonwealth service personnel of World War One, twenty of World War Two, various paupers’ graves and monuments serving as war memorials and symbols of the Victorian Era. The first ever burial in the cemetery is tragically believed to have been a local school master’s ten-month-old son. The headmaster wanted his son to be buried in ‘town land,’ and wished for his interment to take place at Rock Cemetery.

One of the cemetery’s leading attractions to taphophiles and goths alike are the caves located within the cemetery, which are rumoured to have been once marketed as catacombs – a project which ultimately failed due to the much more majestic (and much less musty) plots available above. Before the land was used as a cemetery, the caves were part of a large sand mine. Given that there are no natural caves in Nottingham, they were dug out to excavate a very fine sand which was once used as an abrasive cleaning agent. 

Tours are now available for budding cemetery and cave goers. Unfortunately, in recent times there have been cases of rather questionable graffiti. One piece in particular states the artist’s current bowel movements (Google it if you dare), which raises two main concerns for me. Surely it makes more sense for the perpetrator to just go to the loo rather than addressing it in writing, but also, I find it ironic, and somewhat amusing, that these caves once mined a component for an abrasive cleaning agent. I can only hope that, for the tour guides’ sake, Cif is a mandatory part of their equipment from now on.