The Clock That Never Agrees: The Beaumaris Gaol Curse

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 6, 2026 · How we verify

Only two men were ever hanged at the gaol in Beaumaris, and one of them is said to have taken his revenge on a clock. The Beaumaris Gaol curse belongs to Richard Rowlands, executed in 1862, and it is the single piece of genuine folklore attached to a building whose real history needs no embellishment. The gaol sits in Beaumaris on Anglesey, in north Wales, disused since the 1870s and largely unaltered since the day it closed.

Some orientation before the legend. The gaol was designed by Hansom and Welch and built in 1829. It was expanded in 1867 to hold roughly 30 inmates, then closed just eleven years later. Today it is a museum, drawing around 30,000 visitors a year, and both the building and its perimeter walls carry separate Grade I listings.

From County Gaol to Children’s Clinic

Few small prisons have had such a varied afterlife. When the gaol shut, the building became a police station, a role it held until the 1950s, when it was turned into a children’s clinic. It became a museum in 1974. During the Second World War the town’s air raid siren was mounted in the gaol, and it was kept in working order through the Cold War in case of nuclear attack.

Not everything a visitor sees is original. The chapel, for instance, was fitted out later: the pews and pulpit came from a chapel being renovated elsewhere on Anglesey, which is why the pew numbering runs out of sequence and why none of them is fixed to the floor. It is a useful reminder that a preserved building is still an edited one.

The Treadmill That Pumped the Water

The regime here looks brutal to modern eyes, and in its own day it was considered a humane improvement on what had come before. Discipline relied on chains, whippings and isolation in a dark cell for up to three days.

The gaol also holds one of the last working penal treadmills in Britain. Most treadmills of the period existed purely to grind down the prisoner, motion without purpose. The Beaumaris machine is unusual because it pumped water to the top of the building for use in the cells, so the labour, however punishing, actually produced something.

Richard Rowlands and the Four Faces of the Church Clock

The first of the two executions was that of William Griffith in 1830, for the attempted murder of his first wife. On the morning he was to hang, Griffith barricaded himself inside his cell. The door was forced, and he was half dragged and half carried to the gallows.

The second was Richard Rowlands, hanged in 1862 for murdering his father-in-law. He maintained his innocence to the last moment, and legend holds that from the gallows he cursed the nearby church clock, declaring that if he were innocent its four faces would never show the same time. That is the whole of the curse: a piece of local tradition, not a documented statement, and nothing in the record of the gaol confirms the words were ever spoken.

Both men were buried inside the gaol walls in a lime pit. The exact spot is unknown. What can still be traced are the iron pins that held the gallows in place and the two doors through which the condemned man passed, all visible from the street outside the walls.

The One Man Who Got Out

John Morris is the only prisoner recorded as having escaped, on 7 January 1859, using rope he had stolen while working with it. He broke his leg on the way down, got clear of the town, and was recaptured anyway.

What the Record Actually Says About Ghosts

It is worth being blunt. The documented history of Beaumaris Gaol contains a condemned man’s curse and no verified accounts of apparitions, voices or anything else. Buildings with hangings, punishment cells and a lime pit tend to accumulate ghost stories by reputation alone, and visitors often arrive expecting them. Anything you may hear repeated locally about the corridors or the dark cell sits outside the record, and should be treated as story rather than evidence.

Visiting Beaumaris Gaol

The gaol operates as a museum and is open to visitors, with current opening times and admission details published by the Isle of Anglesey County Council. Its condition is the main draw: this is a small county prison left substantially as it was, cells, treadmill, gallows fittings and all. The gallows pins and doors can be seen for free from the street if the museum is closed when you pass.

Address: Beaumaris, Anglesey, Wales

See Beaumaris Gaol for Yourself

Sources

• Listed Buildings – Full Report – HeritageBill Cadw Assets – Reports
• GeoHack – Beaumaris Gaol
• Wikipedia: Beaumaris Gaol