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| There are multiple buildings like this one |
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| Entrance |
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| The moor from Princetown - nowhere much to escape to |
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Tavistock #4: Dartmoor Prison
Yesterday I caught a local bus from Tavistock to Princetown, Two Bridges, Postbridge and back to Princetown, high and lonely on the moor, the location of Dartmoor Prison. I had an hour in Princetown before the only other bus returning to Tavistock came through. I popped into the High Moor Visitors' Centre and then walked up the road to the entrance to the prison. There was a sign indicating an entrance for visitors so I rang the bell. A very pleasant warden appeared and I asked if I could look around the prison. No, he said, with a smile, I couldn't - it was a working prison with 600 inmates. Duh! I thought the prison had long ceased operating and that just the buildings remained as part of the Dartmoor Prison Museum!! Lots of people make the same request, said the very accommodating warden. Well, I guess that's the first and last time I'll ask to be let into prison. Actually I was disappointed because the buildings look so bleak and formidable, I wanted to get a better view of them. What a miserable place to be incarcerated.
Princetown and the surrounding moor was the inspiration for Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Not surprising.
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Perfect accommodation for the "sods" in there !! We should be less accommodating to our crims over here in stead of giving them the mod cons and relative comfort .. some of which the working population struggle to get/have, yet pay taxes for 'them' to enjoy. Its wrong!
ReplyDeleteIt is a shame you could not go in :) Imagine how bleak it would be in winter.
lol I'm sure the inmates would have loved you looking around. ;)
ReplyDeleteI thought about what it must have been like when it was first built - in the middle of nowhere and so forbidding. Bleak is the word both the surroundings and the buildings.
ReplyDeleteUtterly bleak and moody..lucky they didn't let you in..interesting..no prison I have entered is homely or friendly..Whilst palces of punishment being taken away from society can be punishment enough but some would like to make these wicked evil people suffer more lol
ReplyDeleteCreepy in the extreme.
ReplyDeleteWhen we toured Alcatraz (famous US prison museum off the west coast)---I sat for a few minutes in one of the cells----creepy enough withOUT inmates---can only imagine the sensations surrounding a working prison---and with such grand literary aura----