Winter’s Journey
Northumberland hugs Newcastle’s Northern edges, providing a stark contrast to the bustling modern city we have today and a reminder of its often dark and mysterious past. Northumberland is England’s least populated county and the brooding moors have a powerful and eerie beauty that can overwhelm, particularly on harsh winter evenings.
The drive up into the moors out of Newcastle is now a beautiful wind up into the countryside, however in the past this dangerous route into wilds of Northumberland had a more gruesome edge to it, and on one journey in particular up the old drove road today you can see a visible sign of more turbulent, mysterious and dark history.
In the year 1792, William Winter’s dead body made the long journey up into Northumberland to be hung in chains on Whiskerfield’s common, a wild unforgiving place up on the moors even today. His body was hung on a gibbet (or stob as Northumbrian’s call it) as a warning to other’s in the area and remained in chains for many weeks to rot. Today this gibbet is still there.
William Winter had been accused of the brutal murder of local woman Margaret Crozier who lived at The Old Pele near Elsdon in Northumberland, and no one has lived in The Old Pele since the murder. Winter was executed at Westgate in Newcastle for his crimes.This story and site has inspired a haunting song by Billy Pigg called Gypsy’s Lullaby. Written by the local musician who lived near Winter’s Gibbet, this beautiful tune is usually played on the Northumbrian small pipes and is an emotive but dull cry of passion representing the lament of the widow of William Winter who sang lullabies every night to her baby under the decaying body of her lover. She stayed and sang in the cold nights of Northumberland until the body was finally cut down, declaring his innocence until the end.
The Trevelyan’s, whose land the gibbet was on, replaced it with a wooden body as a constant reminder to people in that area of the ferocity of retribution that could be reaped on those who committed crime. Powerful families stretching back to the Border Reivers owned large swathes of Northumberland in those days (some still do, but with less of an obvious iron hand).
The wooden body was the source of huge superstition and wood chips were taken from it for charms or to cure things as bizarre as toothache, until what remains today is simply a head, hanging from a wooden hangman’s frame high up on the moors by the roadside.
A local boy identified William Winter as a man he saw near The Old Pele on the night of the murder; however his evidence has since been seen to be dubious. The horror and ghost of William Winter haunted this young shepherd boy, high up in the depths of Northumberland, so much that he eventually fled the area to Bywell then on to Scotland through fear of retribution from Winter’s friends, dying of unknown causes at the young age of 20.
Standing on a Winter’s evening
overlooking the dark Northumberland moors that stretch uninterrupted to the horizon, with the Simonside Hills and Cheviots bearing down on you from the North and the gibbet standing tall in front of you, it is easy to feel how the young shepherd boy who fled was overcome by fear in this area.
To view this powerful reminder of the dark history of Northumberland, drive from Rothbury to Elsdon along the Old Drove Road in Northumberland National Park, and look out for it from your car window.