Airing Yards

These yards were built in 1843 to provide a secure place where prisoners could be exercised individually in the open air.

Men and women were escorted from their cells by a warder and locked up in a yard for an hour each day.

A bell, to be rung to alert the prison staff in case of escapes, is hung on the wall of the airing yards.

In wet weather prisoners were provided with capes. If conditions were particularly bad, men could be exercised in the gallery on the upper floor of the New Prison.

Exercising prisoners individually took up so much of the Governor’s and Warder's time that it was eventually decided to demolish the airing yards. They were taken down in May 1882 and from then until the prison closed in 1889 prisoners were exercised together in the prison yard.

Supervised by the prison staff, prisoners now had to walk in a circle each man “such a fixed distance from the others as may render secret communication impossible”.

The airing yards were rebuilt in 1991 on their original foundations using the 1843 drawings of Thomas Brown, architect to the General Board of Directors of Prisons in Scotland.