It's a tale of anti-establishment criminality gone murderously wrong. For a period in late 18th Century a gang of counterfeiters in northern England were producing fake coins on an industrial scale.
Their exploits were punishable by death. But the scale of the forgery was so vast, the Cragg Vale Coiners nearly brought down the British economy.
Now the story of one of the North's original OCGs is being told in a new drama directed by This Is England creator Shane Meadows. The Gallows Pole, a prequel to Benjamin Myers' fictionalised novel of the same name, stars long-time Meadows collaborators Michael Socha and Thomas Turgoose.
