England Guide
The East Midlands
Lincoln Castle
Opening time: April– Sept Mon– Sat 9.30am–5.30pm, Sun 11am–5.30pm; Oct– March Mon– Sat 9.30am–4pm, Sun 11am–4pm
Price: £3.90
Address: Castle Hill
Intact and forbidding, the walls of Lincoln Castle incorporate bits and pieces from the twelfth to the nineteenth century with the wall walkway offering great views over town. The castle wall encloses a large central courtyard, part of which is occupied by the old prison, a dour red-brick structure that holds one of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta as well as a truly remarkable prison chapel. Here, the prisoners were locked in high-sided cubicles, where they could see the preacher and his pulpit but not their fellow inmates. Neither was this approach just applied to chapel visits: the prisoners were kept in perpetual solitary confinement, and were compelled to wear masks when they took to the exercise yard. This system was founded on the pseudo-scientific theory that defined crime as a contagious disease, but unfortunately for the theorists, their so-called Pentonville System of "Separation and Silence", which was introduced here in 1846, drove so many prisoners crazy that it had to be abandoned thirty years later; nobody ever bothered to dismantle the chapel.