The Durdham Down Gibbet and the Ghost That Emptied a Widow’s Rooms

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 25, 2026 · How we verify

Most of the ghost stories attached to open ground in England are vague by nature, but the Durdham Down gibbet leaves a paper trail. Two men are recorded as having been hung in chains on this grassy plateau above Bristol, and one of them, a footpad called Jenkin William Prothero, generated a complaint file, a royal petition and, eventually, a rumour that he was not staying put after dark.

The Down itself is entirely ordinary in daylight. It is an area of public open space in Bristol, and together with its neighbour Clifton Down to the southwest it forms a 400 acre expanse known simply as The Downs, used for walking, jogging and team sports. The exposed position that makes it excellent for kite flying is the same quality that once made it a good place to display a corpse where everyone could see it.

Sheep, Soldiers and a £15,000 Purchase

Durdham Down was grazing land for centuries because its thin soils suited nothing else, neither arable farming nor woodland. An Anglo-Saxon charter of 883 grants grazing rights over part of it, and through the Middle Ages it served as the commons of pasture for the manor of Henbury. In 1643 and 1645, during the English Civil War, Royalist and Parliamentarian armies assembled here.

The Victorian city then began to press in. In 1857, worried by new houses encroaching on the open ground, the Bristol Corporation acquired commoners’ rights on the downs and exercised them the following year by grazing sheep. In 1861 the corporation bought Durdham Down outright from the Lords of the Manor and Hundred of Henbury for £15,000, under the Clifton and Durdham Downs (Bristol) Act 1861. Grazing dwindled through the century and finally ceased in 1925. Since 1861 the land has been managed alongside Clifton Down by the Downs Committee, a joint committee of the corporation and the Society of Merchant Venturers, which appoints a Downs Ranger to oversee the Downs.

Two Gibbetings Above the City

As many as two gibbetings took place on Durdham Down. The first concerned 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 notes he was more troubled by the gibbeting than by the hanging itself: it was said 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 1749 and then gibbeted on the Down.

The second case is the one that lingered. Prothero, a footpad, murdered a pig drover and was sentenced to death on 26 March 1783, the judge specifying that he be gibbeted on Durdham Down. He was hanged on 31 March 1783 and his corpse dipped in tar before being hung in its cage, on what was then Gallows Acre Lane.

The Complaint That Took Prothero Down

The cage hung close to the back of a residential house, and the objections were not squeamish so much as commercial. Visitors to the hot wells near the Down complained. The placement was described as financially “injurious” to a widow living in the nearby house, 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 succeeded: the Sheriff of Gloucester was ordered to find a new site for the gibbet or else have the body dissected.

That is the documented sequence, and it is worth keeping it separate from what came next. A far later account, written in the early 20th century, suggested a different reason for the corpse coming down: rumours circulating that Prothero’s ghost left the gallows each night to haunt Clifton. There is no contemporary record of anyone in 1783 reporting such a thing. The ghost appears in the story roughly a century and a half after the hanging, which makes it folklore rather than testimony. It remains the only haunting attached to the Down in the record, and no modern sightings are documented in the source material.

Landmarks Worth Finding: the White Tree and the Seven Sisters

The Down is characterised by clumps of scrubby hawthorn, avenues of massive horse chestnuts, flat swathes of grass and a border of Victorian houses. The White Tree roundabout was built in the 1950s, though the name seems to go back to the 19th century, and for a short period in 1908 the White Tree was the terminus of the tram 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 was demolished for the roundabout, another cut down during the 1970s outbreak of Dutch elm disease.

The “Seven Sisters” are a group of pine trees on the Down, thinned over the years, notably in the 1990 Burns’ Day storm, leaving three survivors. Replacement trees were vandalised, so an entirely new group of seven has been planted nearby.

Elsewhere, a blue plaque on the public toilets by the water tower on Stoke Road commemorates Victoria Hughes, toilet attendant from 1929 to 1962, who also looked after sex workers in the area. In 1977, aged 80, she published her memoirs as Ladies’ Mile.

Aeroplanes, Prize Fights and First-Class Cricket

The Down has always drawn crowds. On Monday, 31 August 1752 a cricket match was played here 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, against Surrey, at Durdham Down on 2, 3 and 4 June 1870. In the 19th century there were horse races, especially at Easter, wrestling and boxing contests, donkey rides, bands, flower shows, circuses, public meetings and prostitution.

In November 1910 a Bristol Boxkite, newly built at the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company’s factory at nearby Filton, landed on the Down, and the French pilot M. Maurice Tetard made several demonstration flights from the temporary airfield while Bristolians flocked to watch. The sporting tradition continues today with the Bristol Downs Football League playing on permanently laid out pitches.

Walking the Down Today

This is open public land, free to visit at any hour, with the football pitches, paths and grass all in regular use. There is no site to see connected to either gibbeting, no marker and no surviving structure. Gallows Acre Lane is gone as a name. What a visitor gets is the geography: a high, windy plateau where a tarred body in a cage would have been visible from a long way off, and where the neighbours who could see it eventually wrote to the Crown about it.

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 BristolDurdham Down Gibbet GhostKoreshan Historic SiteTrollwood ParkChesapeake Ohio Canal Ghost StoriesDunes State Park