Derbyshire's last gibbet

Above: I’ve circled both Wardlow Mires – where Lingard murdered the toll-keeper – and Peter’s Stone – where his body was hung in an iron gibbet.

Peter’s Stone, the great limestone dome at the head of Cressbrook Dale, is said to take its name from its likeness to the dome of St Peter’s in Rome. Today it looks peaceful enough. But for many years after 1815 it looked down on one of the grimmest sights in the Peak – the body of a young murderer, hung in chains just a short distance from where he committed the dreadful crime.

Hannah Oliver was a 48-year-old widow who lived alone in the toll-house at Wardlow Mires, opposite the Three Stags’ Heads public house. She collected tolls from carriers and travellers using the turnpike road between Peak Forest and Stoney Middleton – today’s A623.

On the night of 15 January 1815, a young man of about 25 from nearby Litton named Anthony Lingard broke into the toll-house to rob her. When she ran to the window to call for help, he strangled her – reputedly with a handkerchief. He escaped with the toll money and a new pair of red shoes.

A pair of red shoes

Lingard had made a young woman named Rebecca Nall pregnant. He offered her the shoes and the money if she would name another man as the father. Suspecting they were stolen, she refused.

He hid the shoes in a haystack, then moved them to his own home, where they were later found. Samuel Marsden, a shoemaker from Stoney Middleton, recognised them as a pair he had made for Hannah Oliver.

Local tradition adds a chilling twist. Inside one heel, Marsden had used a scrap of paper as packing – and on it were printed the words ‘Commit No Crime’.

Lingard confessed, and Rebecca gave evidence against him at the Derby Assizes. Judge John Bailey sentenced him to death, and he was hanged at Derby on 28 March 1815.

His body was then brought back to Wardlow under military escort. It was locked in an iron cage and hung from a gibbet near the scene of the crime – a warning to anyone tempted to follow his example.

Above: Peter’s Stone – a rocky outcrop on the approach from Cressbrook Dale to Wardlow Mires.

Gibbet day

The gibbeting drew huge crowds. On the day, the vicar of Tideswell found his church empty. So he followed his congregation to Wardlow and preached a fire-and-brimstone sermon beneath the gallows.

The whole affair cost almost £96 – for the investigation, the gibbet, and the gaoler and escort from Derby.

A curious story also grew up around the escort’s journey. It is said to have taken a wrong turn at Rowsley and marched along the Duke of Devonshire’s private road through Chatsworth.

When a servant told them to turn back, the young officer is said to have replied that he held the King’s commission, and marched on. The road, so the story goes, became public from that day.

Rattling bones

Lingard’s remains are said to have hung there for 11 years, until 1826, when complaints about the bones rattling in the wind finally had them taken down. Although that does seem a bit of an old wives’ tale since I doubt they would have made so much noise – even in high winds – and it was quite a distance from the nearest house.

The remains were certainly still there in 1818, when 16-year-old Hannah Bocking walked past the gibbet with her friend Jane Grant and gave her a cake laced with arsenic. Bocking was hanged at Derby the following year – among the youngest girls executed in 19th-century England.

Lingard is often said to be the last man gibbeted in Derbyshire, and the practice was abolished across England in 1834. Some say that on a windy night you can still hear the chains along the valley.