The New Murrey and Blue blog

Well, here’s a novelty. Usually things are found at castles and other historic sites, but at Pontefract Castle they’ve lost something. Not a small something either, but a dungeon.

How could that be, do I hear you ask? Well it seems that at least one visitor claims to have been inside this mysterious dungeon in the 1960s. So where is it?

If you go here you’ll read:-

“….Landowners the Duchy of Lancaster agreed to commission an underground survey of the bailey after John Atkinson contacted their estates office with information about an ‘oubliette’ he recalled entering during a guided tour when he was a teenager in the 1960s….

“….Mr Atkinson said the small chamber was hewn from rock, accessed via a trapdoor and wooden steps and not connected to other dungeons or underground rooms that are already open to the public at the castle near Wakefield….”

Aha, so it’s an oubliette, so perhaps I can understand that it’s now rather elusive. The very word comes from the French ‘to forget’!* But how on earth could it be forgotten? It’s not as if we’ve had World War III since the 1960s? Pontefract Castle hasn’t been blown to bits but is now what it was then. Isn’t it? And if visitors were accustomed to entering this oubliette, and can speak of it now, how has it, quite literally, disappeared from living memory?

As usual, the claims of Mr Atkinson were dismissed—aren’t such things too frequently brushed aside? Just another member of Joe Public going on about something he probably dreamed about, etc, etc. But now a lady named Christine Steels has come forward to back him up with memories of her own.

Well, the survey mentioned above was carried out and found….nothing! I can’t believe that the memories of two different people are nothing more than dreams. There is a lost oubliette, and another, more thorough survey should be carried out to find it. If there isn’t another survey, just to make sure, it suggests that anything that lurks at Pontefract Castle is unlikely to be investigated with the complete dedication necessary. That is how something very important could be overlooked.

*Merriam-Webster: Oubliette—a dungeon with an opening only at the top and often a concealed pit below the floor.