Discover Penwood Grange by Bellway, an exciting collection of chain-free three, four and five bedroom homes in Hazelmere.

Set in peaceful countryside and just three miles from High Wickham, this stunning development perfectly blends rural charm with excellent connections to London.

Enjoy woodland walks, sports pitches and play areas right on your doorstep, along with

fantastic incentives to make your move even easier. Search Bellway Penwood Grange today.

Dorchester, Dorset, England, March 17th, 1794.

The new county jail on the north side of town was not yet finished.

Masons were still fitting stone along its outer walls, and the cast-iron bridges connecting the cell blocks to the central building still smelled of the forge. The place had been under

construction since 1789, built on the ruins of the old Norman Castle at the foot of which the

River Frome ran cold and indifferent. It was a modern facility, designed to classify and

separate prisoners by sex and crime, the pride of the Dorset magistrates who had

commissioned it. But on this particular Monday morning, the new jail earned a distinction nobody had

planned for. It became the place where a 15-year-old girl was hanged by the neck until dead.

Her name was Elizabeth Marsh. The records do not tell us much about

her life before that morning, and what little they do tell paints a portrait drawn in poverty's

thinnest ink. She came from the parish of Morden, a scattering of cottages and farmsteads on the

chalky lowlands five miles north of Wareham, where the soil was good enough for wheat and barley and not much else.

The village was tiny, even by Dorset standards of the day, a church, a handful of lanes,

fields running into heath that stretched toward the horizon.

The kind of place a girl could grow up without ever learning the name of the nearest large town,

let alone the theology of damnation. Elizabeth lived with her grandfather, a man named John Neville, who was 70 years old,

and one presumes, too old or too poor, or too indifferent to do much about the education of the child

in his care. How Elizabeth came to live with him the record

...