Ghost
Datchworth's Whipping Post
Iron cuffs still hang on the post where vagabonds were flogged in 1665.
See it clearly
- What's there
- A timber whipping post on the village green
- Legend from
- 1600s
- Tone
- Eerie
On the green ahead stands Datchworth's old whipping post, in a village that calls itself the most haunted in Hertfordshire.
On the edge of Datchworth Green stands a 17th-century timber whipping post, still fitted with rough iron handcuffs and protected by a circular railing. A plaque records that it was last used on 27 July 1665, when two vagabonds were publicly flogged here; village stocks once stood close by. Datchworth also claims to be the most haunted village in Hertfordshire. Its lanes are said to harbour many ghosts, the best known on White Horse Lane towards Welwyn: a headless white horse carrying the ghosts of Danes massacred in 1002, or, in another telling, a Royalist farmer killed with his horse in the Civil War.