8/3/2023 0 Comments Hell on blood island![]() ![]() So, before he began excavating, his team documented the modern graffiti scrawled by 20th century prisoners. When O’Donnabhain arrived nearly a decade later he says the sheets were literally still on the beds. When the 19th-century prison closed in 1883, the island resumed its original function as a military barracks, only to re-open as a prison from 1985 to 2004. "There were a lot of prisoners who were there for things we would not regard as crime today, and sentenced to hard labor," says historian Gillian O'Brien of Liverpool John Moores University. The prison housed convicts from 1847 to 1883. Unsurprisingly, Lombroso’s theories have long been discredited.īut O’Donnabhain says he can’t be certain that that’s exactly what they were doing on Spike Island. “Lombroso did a lot of autopsies of hanged criminals, and he found a particular variation in the architecture of the skull which he said is the sign of the ‘natural born criminal,’” explains O’Donnabhain. O’Donnabhain speculates that this might have been part of a wider study in the 1870s spearheaded by Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso to identify the characteristic physical features of the “born criminal.” “You’re being buried in a convict graveyard on a convict island that’s out of bounds to the rest of society, and yet your peers are just taking care to make a statement that this person was of some worth.”īut one of the most curious discoveries was that a handful of skeletons had the top of their skulls removed. “I read it as a gift from one prisoner to another,” says O’Donnabhain. He says he was surprised by the element of care employed when prisoners buried their fellow inmates, particularly by how carefully they painted the cheap pine coffins to look like oak coffins. It may have been used for other purposes over the years, for escape attempts and so forth.”Īrcaheologists excavate one of Spike Island's prison graveyards. “It also leads to the possibility that there are other types of these staircases in other parts of the older fort. Spike Island’s assistant manager, Alan O’Callaghan, tells CNN of the excitement around the discovery. “The 1804 plans and later drawings make no reference to the staircase, so it truly was a most pleasant shock to see this door leading off this chamber of secrets to such a beautiful piece of stonework,” Crotty said in a press release, Large animal bones and half-drunk bottle of wines were found at the foot of the stairs. The original 10-acre British fortress was built in the late 1700s, but was considered too small to protect the Empire from potential invasion by Napoleon’s forces, so a second, much larger, 24-acre fort was built in 1804.Įxcavation work on a tunnel leading from the inner fortress to the outer moat recently revealed a secret spiral stone staircase, which was not recorded on any of the island’s plans. ![]() It gradually developed into a British military base in the 18th century, before it became a depot for convicts waiting to be shipped to Britain’s penal colonies, such as Australia and Bermuda. Spike Island – often described as “Ireland’s Alcatraz” – has a multilayered history.Įarly records indicate the 104-acre island might have been a 6th-century monastic settlement. In August 2020, island manager John Crotty announced one of the biggest discoveries yet: a secret stone spiral staircase dating back to the end of the 18th century. Over the past seven years, O’Donnabhain and his team have uncovered some of the mysteries buried on Spike Island – including a grizzly procedure long ago carried out on dead prisoners’ corpses. In an attempt to learn more about the men who perished on this prison island, bioarchaeologist Barra O’Donnabhain began excavating the convict graveyard in 2013. ![]() While Spike Island was welcoming boatloads of tourists pre-pandemic – much like Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay or Robben Island off the coast of South Africa – in Victorian times it was a place that many never left, with more than 1,000 prisoners dying there in less than four years. A star-shaped fortress atop a picturesque island off the southwest coast of Ireland once housed one of the world’s biggest prison populations. ![]()
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