Caxton Gibbet

Caxton Gibbet

Yesterday another blipper posted a sign on a local spot up their way about Currys Point and it being the sight of gibbet hangings in years gone by. Remind me of a place just up the road from us, between St Neots and Cambridge. So went and blipped it!

Just for your info, if you don't know about such things......

A gibbet is any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, executioner's block, impalement stake,hanging gallows, or related scaffold).

As well as referring to the gibbet as a device, the term gibbet may also be used to refer to the practice of placing a criminal on display within one.

There are tales of murderers being hanged and displayed at the nearby village of Caxton in the 1670s, and records in a court case that the gibbet was still there in 1745. Several local writers say that it was no longer there by the early decades of the nineteenth century. There is a modern replica which can be seen in photographs dating back to 1900, the erection of which may have been connected with the nearby inn of the same name.

Now a "service station" at this junction!