England #13 – Bodmin, featuring the scary haunted... in The England Chronicles - May 2017

…Bodmin Jail
At last, we have reached our…sob… final day in Cornwall. Of course the fact that we were headed out the next day for Bath made us a lot more cheerful about it, but boy there was a lot we didn’t get to see. And there was a lot we DID see- I think we did pretty well considering how flighty and scatterbrained and prone to getting lost/having disasters we both are.

Although this entry is actually the last day of our first week (Friday May 5, 2017 if you want to get all precise about it), I’ll warn you now it’s going to be three entries. Because we covered a LOT of ground. We went to Bodmin Jail, to Launceston Castle, on to Okehampton Castle, and then drove back from Okehampton to Bodmin across Dartmoor. So, quite the long action packed day! Well, viewing-packed more than action packed, but we saw lots of sights and I took a zillion photos of each one.

But before the jail, I’ll post some pictures of Bodmin itself. It is a really nice little history-filled town, right by the Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Naturally we didn’t see a whole lot of it, as we were always busily zooming elsewhere.

This is what we would see driving in- gorgeous landscape, narrow road. That little teeny thing sticking up a bit right of center is the Bodmin Beacon, which has a great view from atop its hill, but of course we didn’t manage a visit to it. You could see it from all over the place, though.

From the lot where we always parked when we went into town – it was up on a hill and had a very pretty view. And was cheap and never full.

A little street in town. I think I’d pulled off so Kim could run (well, hobble, with her bad knee) back to a coffee shop we’d just passed and get us some coffee. We were always on the hunt for coffee.

I just liked this. A Kebab shop at night. I think we were walking around after we had dinner.

And — the very very creepy and apparently quite haunted (no wonder) Bodmin Jail! It’s quite the tourist attraction – the biggest thing in Bodmin, I’m sure – and I think it’s the only thing we actually paid money (beyond what we paid for our English Heritage Pass) to see. It was maybe $12, not a huge expenditure, and well worth it despite being a bit… touristy. It’s very imposing and scary from the outside:

And pretty scary on the inside as well. Bodmin Jail was in operation from 1778-1928, and there were 60 executions between 1735 and 1909, eight of them women. Most of it is in ruins now, other than the fairly small area that is the exhibit, but while searching for their website I just found a recent article from the Daily Mail saying there are plans to turn the abandoned parts into a hotel. Yikes! Oh, wait – that’s not very recent; that’s a year ago and before we were there. Considering the source it’s probably not true.

So you start off going downstairs….

And then you get to have the beejesus scared out of you when you come around a corner and think this guy is real.

The exhibit is full of these replicas of what life may have been like back when the jail was in use. FULL of them. Which is why it seemed pretty touristy, but it was interesting.

There were also lots of grim views to the grim courtyard/outside areas. (I have these kind of out of order — Prosebox is down, bizarrely, and I’m doing this in OD first, which is actually working fine once I figured out how to make the pictures bigger — but I also keep accidentally deleting them while trying to move them so kind of gave up on that).

And a few cells you could go into and pretend to be a prisoner. It was COLD in there. As cold as it looks like it would be.

There was one big area featuring manikins and the different crimes they were accused of. Some of them seemed very frivolous things to get you thrown into this terrible jail. Like stealing bees and honey. A lot of people ended up there due to not being able to pay their bills, and apparently a whole lot of kids ended up there too, either for stealing food or because their parents were there and they had nowhere else to go.

And being imprisoned for killing your children was shockingly common. This was a quite disturbing little vignette – you can see the woman is dumping her dead child into a well, while a ghost is telling on her in the background.

I love old bottles and keys, so was very pleased to see a bunch of displays of both. Much less disturbing than dead children being pitched into wells by their moms!

Another outside scene.

The exhibit covered five floors, so there was much going up and down stairs. This did not do poor Kim’s knee any favors. But the stairwells were really neat!

There’s a straitjacket in the corner — made out of metal.

Poor little kids amusing themselves behind bars:

And finally, we had coffee in the tea room because OMG WE WERE FREEZING. I wouldn’t have lived through the cold there, let alone the terror. And then, off to Launceston Castle!