The medieval Gaol of Hexham has been stood near the centre of the town for almost 700 years. While written records of the building go back to its foundation in 1330, unfortunately no images were made of it for most of the intervening centuries. It is not until the 18th century that the first known sketches of the Gaol appear.
One of the earliest known depictions of the Gaol was drawn by London printmakers Samuel & Nathaniel Buck in 1728. This sketch provides an overall view of the town of Hexham, with the Gaol, neighbouring Moot Hall, and Abbey all dominating the skyline. Little detail is afforded to the Gaol, but nonetheless the distinctive corbels surrounding the roof are clearly visible. These corbels originally supported parapets, though unfortunately due to the lack of images before that of Bucks’, there is no way to know what the parapets originally looked like.
In 1778, the Swiss draughtsman Samuel Hieronymus Grimm made the first detailed sketch of the Gaol during a visit to Hexham. It is a good likeness, though perhaps does not capture the true scale of the building as it really stands. The extensions protruding from the front face of the Gaol, which in Grimm’s time must have served as the entrances, were installed at an unknown date and were demolished in the 19th century; no trace of them remains today.
Another distinctive quirk of Grimm’s Gaol is the lack of a visible roof. In fact there is every chance that the second storey of the building had no roof at all at the time that this sketch was taken: a description of the Gaol written two decades earlier in 1755 describes the building as containing a “square court on high, tho’ not near the top… to air the prisoners by day”, indicating that the lodging rooms at the top had been converted into some kind of open-air yard. Given that the original timber roof was said to be decaying by the 16th century, it is possible that it had since collapsed or been dismantled, perhaps around the same time as the missing parapets.
The Gaol was again sketched in the 1790s by the Gothic architect and draughtsman John Carter. The features of the building are broadly the same as in Grimm’s drawing, though in typical Gothic fashion, the execution of Carter’s sketch lends the Gaol a more dramatic appearance. Carter’s annotations refer to the building as the ‘Keep of the Castle of Hexham’ rather than a Gaol, and this is consistent with the belief among some writers of the era that it had originally formed part of a castle or pele tower; the building had stood in Hexham for so long that even the townspeople were apparently unsure of its precise origins.
By the time both Grimm and Carter’s drawings were executed, the Gaol was no longer in considerable use. The aftermath of the bloody Hexham Militia Riot on the 9th of March 1761 marked the last ‘busy’ period of the Gaol’s history, as many people arrested during the riot were temporarily imprisoned in the building before being transferred to the larger Morpeth Gaol. At the end of the century, the Gaol was primarily being used as the offices of local solicitors and estate agents. It officially ceased to be a Gaol entirely in 1824, after almost 500 years of near-continuous use, and during the 19th century the building was subjected to considerable restoration work which saw some new features added and others removed. By and large, though, Hexham Old Gaol has probably remained largely the same in its outward appearance as it did when it was first constructed in the 14th century, and a visitor who stands before it today is faced with the same imposing building which Buck, Grimm, and Carter recorded.
Freddy Clifford, Hexham Old Gaol
Friends of the Hatton 