CORNISH PRISON
The Assistants entered Cornwall at Gunnislake, by surprise, and therefore had missed their chance for a Devon Cream Tea.
A Cornish one was decided on instead, at the next available opportunity.

The Assistants arrived at Bodmin Gaol at twilight. It looks great as you come down the hill towards it. A huge, hulking great stone castle. Twilight seemed like a very fitting time to arrive in fact.
It was in use as a prison until the late 1920s and, interestingly, housed the doomsday book during WWII.

It is huge and gloomy and foreboding. Once inside the museum/attraction you find that the entrance seems to be through the pub, which is odd: you seem to, virtually, walk through the Kitchen to get into the museum.
Once in: the assistants found that they were quite alone in Bodmin Jail.
It's an 18^th C prison and it is eerie, to say the least, to be in there alone. Almost alone: we were followed around by a bat for much of the time, which obviously made the experience much more alarming.
It's very evocative of tortures-past in there, very dimly lit, pretty damp, and you really can imagine how horrifying and demoralising it must have been to be banged up there. Many occupants committed such heinous crimes as nicking carrots and loaves of bread, those that didn't get deported to Australia that is. Oh the heady days of smatterhauling and working the treadmill, them were the days guv'nor. http://www.thecriticaltimes.net/2006/05/slang.htm.
The cellars totally spooked us, we stayed and looked and read for as long as we could but it really is very very spooky- even peopled, as it is, with endless comedy, wonky dummies.
It's the stuff that you can't see that is the most concerning, we think- like a restaurant that you've just complained to.... just don't let your mind run away with you.  Fortunately, we were serenaded on one floor by a blaring radio from the bar or the kitchen, playing Tina Turner's Simply the Best. A tad incongruous and not a little bit distracting from the whole 'spooky olden-times gaol, with a'g', experience.  Maybe not such a great touch if you are enjoying the immersion in a haunted past. But, actually, very welcome at that particular spine-tingling moment for two jumpy-birds-from-London with a bat on their tail. Anyway, they spell it with a 'j'
Our reward (we hope that your road trip is full of such rewards that keep you going) for such intense exploration was a Cornish cream tea. We'd been banging on about clotted cream for hours. Josh, who was serving us, wanted to know if the assistants would like a look around the new Brassiere after we'd worked through our huge pile of scones and jam and clotted cream...
the Assistants went with the endearing Josh hoping that in the upstairs Brassiere: customers would be expected to leave big tits for the staff, or order their drinks at the bra. We were shown their new Brasserie- which is in the old prison chapel. It's quite spectacular. We are ashamed to say that we couldn't resist goading Josh to imply again that it is infact a massive bra - by requesting clarification that this was indeed a French restaurant. It is, he confirmed, a Brassiere. So that's settled. Its quite a good idea for a themed bar/bra actually isn't it. You could serve sticky buns with cherries on top and chicken fillets and you could offer different cup sizes of drinks and have lots of lace and satin and big squashy cleavage sofas that patrons would have to struggle to stop themselves falling into the middle of and.. would milk-based cocktails be off-putting? Maybe that'd be going a bit too far, but definitely hammocks.