The Cragg Vale Coiners

A couple of years ago, the BBC showed a TV drama series called 'The Gallows Pole', based on a novel of the same name by Benjamin Myers. It was an oddly surreal dramatisation of the true story of the Cragg Vale Coiners, mostly filmed in Heptonstall and Hebden Bridge. Some filming took place in the Heptonstall Museum. Its main room, which was a pub in the drama, is still set up with props from the TV series and has some of the costumes on display.  

In the late 18th century, the Cragg Vale Coiners were a gang of weavers and labourers, under the leadership of 'King' David Hartley. They supplemented their meagre income from farming and weaving by 'clipping' or shaving the edges of genuine coins. (Done skilfully, this clipping was hard to discern). They then melted down the shavings to produce counterfeit coins. They were pretty successful and proved hard to track down, as this was such a wild and remote area. Eventually, however, one of the gang betrayed the others and in 1769, William Deighton, a public official, arrested David Hartley. He was tried and hanged in York in 1770. He is buried in Heptonstall churchyard, along with his wife Grace, who by all accounts did pretty well herself out of her husband's misdemeanours, able to buy property and live well after his death, until she herself died in 1802.  William Deighton was, in turn, murdered by the coiners, shot dead in Halifax. Most of the coiners were rounded up and arrested, though Hartley's brother Isaac seems to have evaded punishment. 

David Hartley's grave is easy to find because of the coins left as offerings.  

I had to go back to 2011 to find an old photo of mine, showing the inscription more clearly. Time gradually weathers the lettering on these old graves.