Breakfast and Prison

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

The Livewire was so much fun yesterday I woke up thinking about it and decided as Sunday is please yourself day -not that sort @Tym and it was early enough to be cool I decided to go over the Mendips and get some breakfast. Mr Slowly said he’d come with and picked his steed for the day, honestly in the sunshine there was only one choice.

We stopped for fuel, well Mr Slowly did. The Livewire powered up while we slept so I opened the garage door to a ready to roll bike. 

Here it is quietly fuelling itself up.

 

I sat patiently at the petrol station while the pump had a malfunction and spewed petrol all over the low rider. There was a convivial air about and another biker complained he’d misjudged his photo bomb timing, could he have another go?

 

A group of hardy Kutte wearing mean faced men arrived but couldn’t have been nicer as I dashed through their entrance to get to the blue roll, didnt try to take their pic Im not that stupid  

BTW I love those blue Spada gloves on the pillion seat of the Livewire but they wont stop shedding dye, I have Smurf hands every time I wear them

We head across the Mendips, its a beautiful temperature across there, definitely the place to go when its hot.

Mr Slowly said I wont be able to keep up with you on that, I say cors you will (the low rider is 1800cc) but he was right, the instant power delivery on the Livewire and throwability is something else.

Fortunately our current escapades have arrived us in a comfortable riding together style- set the destination and ride how you feel, so you wanna go for it then do it, see you there!

I arrive and attempt a selfie of me being happy with my new steed, I may enter it into the ‘crap bike shot of the year’ competition, though Bucksters wheelie bin fetish will probably outdo me

 

A man in a posh Range Rover gave me his day parking ticket (result cos bikes can only park in the designated bike bay and thats not in the shade) and so I wait a bit, then a bit more and a bit more, then I start worrying. Just as I open the ‘stalk my family’ app (aka find my friends- Ive opened this app twice in my life) I hear the satisfying rumble of a Harley pulling in.

We head to a cafe in Shepton Mallet called the Cheeky Bean cafe but Shepton Mallet isnt interested in being open, the whole place seems shut. This charming well reviewed cafe has decided they dont want to work today either.

 

“a little days holiday” hmph!

 

The Market Cross in the centre of Shepton Mallet

 

I find somewhere open.. barely, it opened yesterday and despite being the only customers they’re not ready for customers. Ok breakfast, not great but they all looked pretty hungover so have to cut them some slack  

Shepton Mallet is an ancient place and as with the architecture theres an air about the people that are from another era. Theres no reason for anyone to move there and you get the feeling like you do in some West Country places they’re a different breed.

For you South West riders- saw this on a boarded up shop, might be worth a look.

Breakfast done, temperature rising, time to head home..

except I remember @bobonelegs pics of the outside of Shepton Mallet Prison. Im definitely going to have a look before I leave…

 

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

Soz tried deleting the last two repeated pics more than once. It wont let me!

[boboneleg]

So did you visit the prison ?

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

10 minutes ago, boboneleg said:

So did you visit the prison ?

Yep. Incoming shortly!

[Pedro]

48 minutes ago, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

Soz tried deleting the last two repeated pics more than once. It wont let me!

You uploaded them twice, have to delete them from the attachment files below.

[XTreme]

Great report!

Did the electric one attract much attention?

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

2 hours ago, XTreme said:

Great report!

Did the electric one attract much attention?

Most folk only see ‘ooh look its a womany thing on a bike’ and dont see the bike at all! 

Had a bit of fun with some MANLY bikers on the way back.. oh no beaten by a girl boohoo

I dont stop to mention Im a middling rider on a superior bike .. oh no I just bathe in the temporary glory

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

Like @boboneleg before me the £14 entry fee made me think no thanks. But this place has been slap bang in the centre of Shepton Mallet since the 1600’s and having watched some amazing history destroyed by developers (particularly in Bristol and Guildford) it felt like- see it now while you can. 

I coughed up the £14 expecting to do a half an hour march around the place and get out before the heat hit. 

There was a party being guided around by a very competent and entertaining person but other than that I had the place to myself, I wandered around an empty decaying prison for over two hours and thats something given the heat and the no flex mobike boots I couldnt walk in  

The place only closed to prisoners 2013.

This is main yard, in a more humane time you were allowed out for an hour a day. In Victorian times that was single file anti-clockwise walk in silence for an hour.

 

Standing in three tiers of prison cells totally on your tod is an experience. 

You're free to wander where you want and open any door you like, very little is shut to off to you, youre just trusted to wander around this large complex at your own pace. 

The cells were (unsurprisingly) small, a board informs you that prison numbers meant at one time many of these tiny cells had four beds in them

Theres something weirdly appealing about decay, peeling paint has its own thing going on and this place is peeeeling!

 

There are no cells against the outer wall, this is to stop tunnelling out.

There are many information boards throughout about the different stages of the prison and life inside the walls. Not wanting to get caught up for too long I photographed them with the intention of reading them later but most were so interesting I stopped and read the whole thing. 

Gaol fever, the execution room and the executioners, the military prison, segregation of men and women (that was a more modern thing than you’d think), the hard larbour (a treadmill, rock breaking, the hideous sounding ‘Oakham breaking’) force feeding suffragettes, the separate wing for snitches, peadophiles and policemen and the poltergeist of a woman who died in her wedding dress all well explained on boards.

 

The 1600’s part is buried under the current building. It was literally built on top. But some tiny parts are still accessible.

Undeterred by the current health and safety rules you’re still allowed to go up the stairs (“warning these are narrow, steep, uneven and have no hand rail”) and see where the look out lived. You can climb through a “hole in the wall” to see the 1600’s cells. Such tiny dark pits, theres no way anyones coming out alive. 

It was dark in there and when the flash illuminated the joining cells, seeing the hand on the bars did make me jump!

 

 

A very low ceiling not for the taller folk! 

I’ll be going back for a second look, possibly on a guided tour so I can ask the questions that today thew up but if you like old shite this is for you. I certainly won’t be booking “an over night stay” or “in the dark night time paranormal tour”

A surprising number of Caroline’s were transported

 

Going to uni and doing nurse training in the 90’s meant spending a lot of time in ageing institutional settings.

Brookwood (the step down from Broadmoor) St Peters at Chertsey, St Lukes in Guildford where we received lectures in the workhouse that still had the stone breaking cells underneath, the BRIs ‘Old Building’ and the Bristol General Hospital (conceived in the Georgian era and finished in the Victorian, only closing in 2012). The surprise today was they smell the same. It must be the type of stone used the type of paint the disinfectants, I dont know what but it smells like only those places do, even now after a decade of disuse Im transported back!

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

Oh and I asked someone who works there to take this one Pete styley

 

 

[Catteeclan]

While on our travels me and Mandi have stopped off at Oxford prison and Lancaster Castle both were far more interesting than we first thought.

[XTreme]

Superb Caroline! 

[Buckster]

8 hours ago, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

Oh and I asked someone who works there to take this one Pete styley

 

 

That will be in Pete’s wank bank now, it won’t help the mange.

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

[MooN]

Thanks @Slowlycatchymonkey, great report and nice pics. 

[boboneleg]

Brilliant Caroline, I wish I hadn't been so tight now about the entry fee.  Some of those sentences would send a shiver down your spine nowadays, a 16 year old getting 10 years for stealing a shawl

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

1 hour ago, boboneleg said:

Brilliant Caroline, I wish I hadn't been so tight now about the entry fee.  Some of those sentences would send a shiver down your spine nowadays, a 16 year old getting 10 years for stealing a shawl

Only on the other side of the Mendips so not a lot of hassle if you want to go one day

The lack of humanity is felt throughout. 

Dodgy topic but the way we currently treat prisoners in the UK isn’t much better, it leads to an over 50% reoffending rate. In Norway it’s 20%. Our desire “to make people pay” means every does, the tax payer and everyone around them they impact as they repeat offend. 
 

A judge in Norway 2019 refused to extradite a man due to our prisons being “inhumane” 

Last year they were reporting 3/4s of prisoners were locked in for 23hrs a day- a recipe for madness if there ever was one. 

There are many great examples of better ways to do it in other countries but being seen to be “tough on crime” is such a political football we stick with the same broken system. 

[boboneleg]

I usually find myself finding ways to go around Shepton Mallet if I'm down that way, it usually involves a trip down the Fosseway into Charlton Mill

 

[Sir Fallsalot]

The words Shepton Mallet brings back some great memories for me, we used to go to a motorcycle rally there many many years ago. One year everyone encourage one of the girls with us to enter the wet T shirt competition so she did and a fine pair they were, but in a sad turn of events the people who encouraged her then started slagging her off for doing it i couldn't believe it bunch of dicks is what i told them, anyway since then she's been known as Shepton Mallet Sian 

[Marcel le Moose Fondler]

Great report.... Love the pics... 

     I've got to look up that livewire.. Im intreeged.. 

[Marcel le Moose Fondler]

14 minutes ago, Sir Fallsalot said:

The words Shepton Mallet brings back some great memories for me, we used to go to a motorcycle rally there many many years ago. One year everyone encourage one of the girls with us to enter the wet T shirt competition so she did and a fine pair they were, but in a sad turn of events the people who encouraged her then started slagging her off for doing it i couldn't believe it bunch of dicks is what i told them, anyway since then she's been known as Shepton Mallet Sian 

My mother maiden name is mallet. 

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

11 minutes ago, Marcel said:

Great report.... Love the pics... 

     I've got to look up that livewire.. Im intreeged.. 

TBH Marcel Ive read nothing about the bike. Mr Slowly fancied it, it was a superb deal so we agreed we'd get it and share it. I resisted reading anything about it (that was hard for me) because I didn't want my thoughts on it skewed by the anti electric bike brigade so decided I'd just get it, ride it for a while and wait n see how I found it.

[Buckster]

7 minutes ago, Marcel said:

My mother maiden name is mallet. 

Is her first name Timmy?

[Marcel le Moose Fondler]

2 minutes ago, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

TBH Marcel Ive read nothing about the bike. Mr Slowly fancied it, it was a superb deal so we agreed we'd get it and share it. I resisted reading anything about it (that was hard for me) because I didn't want my thoughts on it skewed by the anti electric bike brigade so decided I'd just get it, ride it for a while and wait n see how I found it.

Can't wait to see what you think of it... Like range and how long to re charge it after the battery is drained. 

[Marcel le Moose Fondler]

1 minute ago, Buckster said:

Is her first name Timmy?

No dickhead..... Marie. 

[Six30]

40 minutes ago, Sir Fallsalot said:

The words Shepton Mallet brings back some great memories for me, we used to go to a motorcycle rally there many many years ago. One year everyone encourage one of the girls with us to enter the wet T shirt competition so she did and a fine pair they were, but in a sad turn of events the people who encouraged her then started slagging her off for doing it i couldn't believe it bunch of dicks is what i told them, anyway since then she's been known as Shepton Mallet Sian 

Any pics ?