[XIII.]
The Legend of Gallow’s Clough.
NEAR Mottram, on the verge of the moors, overlooking what is now the high road to Stalybridge, is a spot known as Gallow’s Clough, which, as its name implies, was in feudal times the scene of the Gibbeting of malefactors. Here in the good old days, was reared the gallows, whereon the criminal was first “hanged by the neck until he was dead,” and from which his body was afterwards suspended in chains, until the weather and the birds between them had picked the flesh away, and nothing remained but a few bones—a grim reminder of the power of the law, and the folly and risk of departing from the paths of virtue.
In the days when gibbetting was fashionable, it behoved almost every petty township to possess its own gallows, for there was far too great a demand for the services of rope and hangman to permit of only a few recognised places of execution, and one common hangman, as is the custom at the present time. Not that people were very much worse than they are now, but the extreme punishment of the law was meted out for what are now considered the minor crimes of sheep and cattle stealing, poaching, highway robbery, house-breaking with violence, and such like offences. The sight of a dead man dangling between earth and sky was of too common a nature to cause surprise, even so late as the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Wild and lonesome as the Gallow’s Clough is at the present day, it was a much bleaker and more awesome place in the days when the gibbet was standing there. Then it was considered as a place accursed, and was said to be haunted by the ghosts of all the dead men who had been strangled there. Even in the daylight folk gave the spot a wide berth, and at night when the winds moaned down the gullies from the hills, and swayed the dead men to and fro, and caused the chains to clank and rattle, then, indeed, the traveller kept as far off as his route would permit, and hurried past with beating heart, and face blanched with fear.
Nor was that all the terror. Witches were said to infest the place at certain seasons, and in the darkness to hold converse with the ghosts of the malefactors, from whom they learned how to transact deeds of darkness successfully. Men forced to pass that way at these seasons had seen from a distance the crouching forms of the old hags, and had even heard their crooning voices, and the fiendish laughter with which they accompanied their terrible midnight revels. Many a timid dame added a petition to her prayers—that Providence would accord her and all belonging to her, special protection from the witches who danced and plotted and sang the hell-song round the gibbet at Gallow’s Clough.
On a certain day in the olden time, a throng of people might have been seen wending their way through Mottram to the place of execution at Gallow’s Clough. It was a gloomy procession,—calculated to depress the beholder for the remainder of the day, and probably for many days to come. First marched a company of well-armed men—part of the retinue of the feudal lord—and in their midst was one bound, and wearing a halter dangling from his neck. Behind came a motley company of the country-folk—some weeping, some grimly silent, and some few laughing and jesting. Most of those who thus followed in the heels of the armed men were women, and in the front rank of these was a handsome peasant girl, who wrung her hands and cried aloud as though distracted.
The prisoner—condemned man though he was, with only a few hundred yards between himself and death—walked with a firm tread, and head held proudly erect. Now and then he turned his head to look at the weeping, wailing girl, and at such times his eyes grew moist: when the guards somewhat roughly thrust the girl back, his lips compressed, and his chest heaved, and his arms tugged at the thongs which bound him, in a manner which indicated that it would have fared ill with the guards had the young man been free. But beyond those silent manifestations of feeling, the prisoner marched to his death as calmly and fearlessly as though the journey had been an ordinary country walk.
Presently the procession reached the gibbet at Gallow’s Clough, and here it halted. The guard cleared a space about the gibbet, and by means of their axes and bills kept back the crowd. The prisoner and the executioners took their place beneath the gallows, and near them stood a well-dressed man—the representative of the feudal lord.