Dance Around the Gallows Tree
Three Quarter Time track 8
Ian Giles worked for several years as a tour guide at Oxford Castle. For much of its history - right up until 1996 - the 11th century castle served as a prison. He wrote Dance Around the Gallows Tree as the finale of a ballad opera celebrating the lives (and deaths) of some of the prison’s more colourful inmates. The “Hip! fol the day” refrain at the end echoes the Treadmill Song from our previous CD, The Robber Bird.