We were too late yesterday to be able to do the Titanic museum so instead we went to sample the delights of Crumlin Gaol. Built in Victorian times, the jail remained in use until the 1990’s during which time it wasn’t deemed viable due to a variety of …er… security issues.

First up when you enter the jail is the receiving area where the inmates are stripped of their identity and issued with their number. We were told that if an inmate returned, they had the same number. This led to a number of questions which for the benefit of the group I kept in my head. Such as, what about number re-use – if you are confident someone is a reformed character and isn’t coming back, can you re-use the number? What happens if you re-use it then the original prisoner returns? Do you have Prisoner C33A and C33B? And which one is it? At least with the executed prisoners you would know they weren’t coming back.

I’ve since twigged that they probably didn’t re-use and just kept going. In which case, who was number 1? And number 13? Plus, 1563 isn’t very snappy – would that get shortened at all?

You can tell that for me, they didn’t dwell enough on this detail.


These are the bags that the prisoners’ effects were kept in while they were inside. So you go back into the outside world smelling of hessian. Nice.

The view below is of C wing. Steve took a picture of Lorna in front of this view and it has what appears to be ectoplasm smeared across it. Or a big ghostly apparition about to swallow Lorna up. If only I believed in ghosts this would have been quite the tour. There is apparently a lot of paranorman activity in the tunnel under the road to the courthouse where it’s really cold (Brrr!) and in the coffin room. There was a clock in one of the rooms where the second hand jumps about every quarter of a minute rather than moving smoothly. I’d be more convinced that this was down to paranorman if I knew that the hand moved smoothly when not in the room, but jumped when brought back in again. Not wanting to spoil anyone’s fun, just sayin’


The tour guide really came into her dramatic own in the capital punishment suite. She dramatically described the situation including having someone with the condemned man watching him day & night, breakfast on The Big Day and how he washed and was checked for obstructions, etc. Then (SPOILER ALERT) she pushes back the shelves/wardrobe in the bathroom to reveal the execution room. We all ushered through, and the whole process was described in great detail. It was really interesting, but it was only afterwards when I was asked whether I would have wanted to know how graphic it was ahead of taking the tour with children that I thought maybe it might have been a bit too graphic for the kids.

Really, though, we’ve always tried to be honest with them, and although the description was nice and specific there weren’t really any haunting images for them to be troubled by. Just as an aside, Joel is currently pretending his new green & yellow slinky is a stream of vomit. So I think it was fine. Children of a more sensitive nature may prefer to cover their ears at that point.


All in, it was a pretty good tour, reasonable value for money and about a good length. We took a cab there and walked back – which I’m regretting with sore feet today, but it wasn’t really a taxingly long walk in itself.

And see, the children don’t seem *too* troubled by nightmares…