The gallows at Beaumaris stood against the gaol wall facing the church of St Mary and St Nicholas, and from the scaffold the condemned man could see its clock tower. Richard Rowlands had been convicted of killing his father-in-law, and he insisted to the last that he had not done it.
The story is that as he stood on the gallows he looked across at the church and laid a curse on its clock. If he was innocent, he said, its four faces would never show the same time again. Then he was hanged.
To this day, people in Beaumaris will tell you, the clock's faces have never agreed. Whether that is a dead man's vindication or just the difficulty of keeping four dials on an old mechanism in step, the story has kept Rowlands' claim of innocence alive for more than a century and a half.
Comments