LOCK yourself into the past....

Explore life in a 19th Centruy Jail

Living History Performances

Original Cells

Meet Jailors and Inmates

Spectacular Roof-Top Views

Story of Jail Life

(This is the most realistic place I have ever been to)

Living History actors take you on a tour of the Victorian jail. Just see what it was like 150 years ago, discover life behind bars.

As  you enter you are greeted with the most fantastic acting I have ever seen...

You will meet Jock Rankin, the town's hangman from the days when criminals would be publically whipped, branded, banished or hanged.  Come face to face with Frederick Hill, Victorian Inspector of Prisons, to hear his views on prison reform.  Visit the inmates, see the solitary cells and witness the strict regime by which the Victorians sought to correct their morals.

(I was asked to sit in this very seat and was chained up with such heavy chains and all the time the Hangman is telling you terrible stories that were suffered in those days.  Then the noose went round my neck and he left me there for so long I really felt I was "living the part" - all the other tourists were so "quiet" you could have heard a pin drop)

 

(We were all told to stand outside the cells - all the cell doors being shut - with one switch the doors were opened and we were told to go in - I tell you it was soooooo scary and soooooo realistic.  The models looked alive and so sad and in such terrible states of pain)

We saw all the instruments of torture and saw the squalor that the inmates lived in, some being so very young.   For 400 years  prisoners were kept in the old Tollbooth Jail.  It was a stinking overcrowded place. Then pressure for improvement came with prison reform and so the new purpose built Stirling Old Town Jail was opened in 1847. It was designed by Thomas Brown and opened as a County Jail, the building was used as the only millitary prison in Scotland from 1888 until 1935.  Restoration to it's current use began in the early 1990's.

Today's prisons are like a ***** Hotel in comparison.

"In prisons, which are really meant to be a terror to evil doers, there must be a great deal of solitude; coarse food; a dress of shame; hard incessant, irksome eternal labour; a planned and regulated and unrelenting exclusion of happiness and comfort" Sydney Smith 1821