Cart Score

Once known as Gallows Score, with manorial documentation of c. 1720 relating to property ownership and transfer in this location showing both terms in use - which would seem to suggest that this was the time of change from one to the other. It has been postulated that the name perhaps relates to a Mr. Gallow, who lived nearby - but no one of that name has ever been found as a resident in the manorial records and an earlier association with a gibbet-pole (rather than the apparatus of execution itself) is feasible. 

Before it became the dominant town in the local area (this being achieved progressively, throughout the 15th century), Lowestoft had shared the governance of Lothingland Half-hundred with Gorleston from the latter end of the 13th century and for most (if not all) of the 14th. Among the privileges accorded to both places were right of gaol and stocks, for the apprehension and punishment of wrong-doers. The Half-hundred Manor itself (which was held in tandem with that of Lowestoft from c. 1306 onwards) would probably have had right of gallows itself, at one time, but no place of execution has ever been identified or established. However, a gibbet-pole on which to hang the corpse of an executed local felon (even one meeting his or her end far from home) could have been returned to the home-area. The top of Cart Score (obviously deriving that particular name from the passage of wagons to and from the Denes) would have been a bleak and exposed part of the North Common, crossed by different tracks and paths - a suitable environment for the location of a gibbet.