The Last Gibbet Here and there around the Peak we have a Gibbet Moor, Gibbet Barn and several Gibbet Woods and Gibbet Fields. A gibbet was a scaffold where the corpse of a criminal was hung as a dreadful warning to others. In early times the criminal was gibbeted alive and left to starve to death. In April 1815 the dead body of Anthony Lingard of Tideswell was gibbeted at Wardlow Mires. Writer Ebenezer Rhodes saw the gruesome sight for himself: ‘... at a little distance on the left of the road, we observed a man suspended on a gibbet, but newly erected. He had entered the cottage of a poor woman who kept the tollgate at Wardlow Mear’. William Newton, the Minstrel of the Peak, was so moved by the grief of Lingard’s father at seeing the gibbet that he wrote a poem ‘Supposed Soliloquy of a Father’. This began to change public opinion and there was no more gibbeting in Derbyshire. Read on for the full story and the poem. Read More >> More Pictures Crime & Punishment