Tarred, Caged and Rumoured to Walk: Haunted Durdham Down

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 26, 2026 · How we verify

Most of the people crossing this grass on a windy afternoon are flying kites or walking dogs, which makes the reputation of haunted Durdham Down all the stranger. This 400 acre expanse of open ground in Bristol, shared with neighbouring Clifton Down and known collectively as The Downs, was for centuries a place where bodies were hung up in iron cages to rot in public view. One of those bodies, according to a much later account, was cut down because people had begun saying it would not stay put after dark.

Quick orientation: Durdham Down is free public open space, managed with Clifton Down by the Downs Committee, a joint committee of the corporation and the Society of Merchant Venturers, which owns Clifton Down. The committee appoints a Downs Ranger to oversee the Downs. Its exposed position, the reason it suits kite flying so well, is also the reason it once suited a gibbet.

Grazing Rights, Civil War Musters and a Purchase for £15,000

Durdham Down was long used as grazing land, because its thin soils made it unsuitable for arable land or woodland. An Anglo-Saxon charter of 883 grants grazing rights over part of it, and during the Middle Ages the down served as the commons of pasture for the manor of Henbury. In 1643 and again in 1645, during the English Civil War, Royalist and Parliamentarian armies assembled here.

The modern down exists because Victorians worried about losing it. In 1857, concerned by Victorian-built houses encroaching on the open space as the city expanded, the Bristol Corporation acquired commoners’ rights on the downs, and exercised them the following year by grazing sheep. In 1861 Durdham Down itself was bought by the city from the Lords of the Manor and Hundred of Henbury for £15,000 under the Clifton and Durdham Downs (Bristol) Act 1861. The preamble to that Act noted that the Downs had ‘been used as a place of public resort and recreation since time immemorial’. Grazing declined through the 19th century and finally ceased in 1925.

Joseph Abseny, More Afraid of the Cage Than the Rope

The first of as many as two gibbetings recorded on Durdham Down involved Joseph Abseny, a Swedish Catholic convicted of the murder of a servant girl in Bristol. He was sentenced to execution and gibbeting on 5 August 1749, and the record makes clear which half of the sentence frightened him: it was noted that “he did not care if they quarter’d his body so that it was not hung up in the air for Prey to the Birds”. He was executed on 25 August that year and then gibbeted on the down.

Jenkin William Prothero and the Gibbet on Gallows Acre Lane

The second case is the one the ghost story attaches to. Jenkin William Prothero was a footpad who murdered a pig drover. He was sentenced to death on 26 March 1783, with the judge specifying that he should be gibbeted on Durdham Down. Prothero was hanged on 31 March 1783 and gibbeted accordingly, a process that involved dipping his corpse in tar.

His cage hung near the back of a residential house on what was then Gallows Acre Lane, and it caused a scandal for entirely practical reasons. Complaints were made, particularly by those who came to the hot wells near the down. The placement was recorded as financially “injurious” to a widow living in the house close to the gibbet, because she could no longer let her apartment to “persons of decent repute” during the summer. Locals petitioned the Royal court to have the body moved, and they succeeded: the Sheriff of Gloucester received an order to find a new site for the gibbet, or else to have the body dissected.

The Rumour That the Body Walked to Clifton

Here is where record ends and legend begins, and the join is worth being precise about. The contemporary documents give a mundane explanation for the gibbet’s removal: complaints, lost lodging income, a petition, an order from the court. It is a far later account, from the early 20th century, that suggested Prothero’s corpse was cut down as a result of rumours that had been circulating of his ghost leaving the gallows each night to haunt Clifton.

That is the whole of the ghost story as the sources carry it. There is no named witness, no date for a sighting, and no account written down at the time. What survives is a claim made well over a century after the event about what people were supposedly saying in 1783. Anyone visiting in the hope of a documented haunting should know that the evidence here is a rumour about a rumour, resting on a very real tarred body in a very real cage.

The Other Layers on the Down

Grim history is only one seam. On Monday, 31 August 1752 a cricket match was played on the down between Bristol Cricket Club and London Cricket Club for a stake of 20 guineas, announced in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal two days earlier. Gloucestershire County Cricket Club played its inaugural first-class match here, against Surrey, on 2, 3 and 4 June 1870. Through the 19th century the down hosted horse races at Easter, wrestling and boxing contests, donkey rides, bands, flower shows, circuses, public meetings and prostitution.

In November 1910 a Bristol Boxkite, newly built by the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company’s factory at nearby Filton, landed on Durdham Down, and the French pilot M. Maurice Tetard made several demonstration flights that afternoon from the temporary airfield while Bristolians flocked to watch. A blue plaque on the public toilets by the water tower on Stoke Road commemorates Victoria Hughes, the toilet attendant from 1929 to 1962, who also looked after sex workers in the area and who published her memoirs as Ladies’ Mile in 1977, aged 80.

Finding the White Tree and the Seven Sisters

The down is public open space and free to walk at any time, with the Bristol Downs Football League playing on permanently laid out pitches. Two landmarks help you orient yourself. The White Tree roundabout is a road junction on Durdham Down; the roundabout dates from the 1950s but the name appears to go back to the 19th century, and for a short period in 1908 the White Tree was the tram terminus before the line was extended to Westbury. There have been several white trees at the junction, either a silver birch or a tree with its trunk painted white, one demolished for the roundabout and another cut down during the 1970s outbreak of Dutch elm disease.

The “Seven Sisters” are a group of pines on the down, thinned over the years and notably by the Burns’ Day storm of 1990, leaving three survivors. Replacement trees were vandalised, so an entirely new group of seven has been planted nearby. Between them sit clumps of scrubby hawthorns, avenues of massive horse-chestnuts, flat swathes of grass and a border of Victorian houses. Gallows Acre Lane no longer carries that name, so there is no marked spot to stand and look at. That absence is part of the point: the down keeps its worst history unlabelled.

Address: Durdham Down, Bristol, England

See Durdham Down for Yourself

Sources

• 'To Keep Open and Unenclosed': The Management of Durdham Down since 1861
• Storming of Bristol
• Statue of celebrated 'loo lady' who shocked Bristol has mysteriously appeared
• Under the shroud: a brief ghostly history
• A Dangerously Empty Space: Crime and Punishment on English Wastelands
• Wikipedia: Durdham Down

Ghost Tours Nearby

Ghosts, Ghouls & Gallows :The Original Bristol Ghost Walk★ 4.8 (265)from $30Fully guided Bristol Ghost Tours★ 4.8 (180)from $24

Affiliate links: BeyondHaunted may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

More Haunted Parks

Durdham Down Gibbet GhostDurdham Down Gibbet Bristol 2Koreshan Historic SiteTrollwood ParkChesapeake Ohio Canal Ghost StoriesDunes State Park