Jailhouse rocks

From the late 1700s onwards, Britain went through a period of great social reform as changing attitudes led to many alterations to the country's legal and social systems. One of the areas of change was how society dealt with crime and punishment.

Today, Appleby police station stands on the site of the original 1771 gaol house and court in the town, which were built to serve the now defunct county of Westmorland. The fact that the gaol house was constructed and developed during this period of reform meant that many of the new social attitudes were reflected in the design of the building.

In this new age of crime and punishment, men and women prisoners were separated; executions were held privately, instead of in public places; prisoners had their own cells, rather than being kept in large, communal ones; and a regime of repetitive, mindless tasks was imposed to break the will of the inmates. Could Time Team find any evidence of the original gaol and the regime that it represented?

Various plans
With various plans to work from, the Team set out to uncover the different phases of the gaol's development. These involved two major rebuilding phases – in the 1820s and 1870s – after the initial construction in 1771.

Beneath the modern tarmac car park surface, the ground was found to be hard and unforgiving. But after some perseverance the first evidence was unearthed for the most recent phase of the prison development, dating from the 1870s, when Phil Harding discovered a treadmill room, where prisoners would have been forced to labour for hours on end like hamsters on a wheel.

Following a full survey of the site, Stewart Ainsworth matched up the plans and maps with the emerging archaeological evidence. Foundations for the second phase of the prison, built in the 1820s, were uncovered, including a new women's wing to the prison. Finally, the groundplan of the larger 1771 gaol was defined, completing the history of the site.

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