THE BALLAD OF CHARLOTTE DYMOND

It was a Sunday evening,

And in the April rain,

Charlotte went out from our house,

And never came home again.

Launceston was home to Charles Causley, a poet described by Ted Hughes as the best laureate we never had. A bachelor, Charles wrote about his town and duchy in many verses; perhaps his most famous poem of all is The Ballad of Charlotte Dymond. It tells the tale of an horrific murder during Victorian times.

Her shawl of diamond redcloth,

She wore a yellow gown.

Carried a green handkerchief,

She bought in Bodmin town.

About her throat her necklace,

And in her purse her pride,

As she walked one evening,

Her lover at her side.

Matthew Weeks was that lover, a half-crippled farm labourer who had grown infatuated with the beautiful girl. However, she had another suitor, one perhaps more favoured by birth. His name was Thomas Prout and he was a relative of the woman on whose Bodmin Moor farm she worked.

It is hard to keep a secret in the countryside and Charlotte's infidelity was discovered. Her illicit affair had tragic consequences. Fatal consequences. For the jealous Matthew plunged a knife into her young chest and murdered her.

The next morning, poor Charlotte's corpse was found in a stream flowing at the bottom of Rough Tor. Matthew fled to Plymouth, where he was apprehended by the police. Tried at Bodmin Assizes, he was hanged outside the town gaol.

Charlotte she was gentle,

But they found her in the flood.

Her Sunday beads among the reeds,

Beaming with her blood.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spot where Charlotte died is said to be haunted by her restless spirit. Many people claim to have seen her ghost there, near a memorial plaque that mentions the cruel act which took her life.

Bodmin Gaol is also said to be haunted. Indeed, one can spend the night there, amongst its eerie ruins, in the hope of seeing something frightening.

Myself, I walked to the old gallows pit one sunny afternoon, where I experienced something very unsettling. The temperature plunged and a strange feeling overwhelmed me. It was as though something very evil inhabited the place. A voice within my mind told me to leave. It seemed to say, "there is nothing here to keep you".

P.S. My novel, The Children of Powerful Men, features the characters of Matthew Weeks, Charlotte Dymond and Thomas Prout. They are reimagined as people living in the modern age. People who may have been involved in a terrible miscarriage of justice.