The Devil in the Northern Landscape
When something in the northern countryside was too big, too odd or too old to explain, people tended to give it to the Devil. A pile of rocks on a moor was his dropped load. A standing stone was a missile he threw and missed with. A twisted church spire was his doing, and a cave was his backside. This is a guide to the Devil (and his older cousins, the giants) in the landscape around Sheffield, the Peak and Yorkshire: the Apronful of Stones above Bradfield, the Hell Hole in the Rivelin, the Devil’s Arse, the crooked spire, the Devil’s Arrows, and what the stories might be remembering.
The Apronful of Stones, Bradfield
On the moors above Bradfield, west of Sheffield, there is a cairn that has been called the Apronful of Stones for at least 250 years. In 1776 the antiquarian Watson described “a large carnedde, called by the country people the Apron-full of Stones”, and in 1819 Joseph Hunter called it a “vast carnedde” and a “giant barrow”. Watson guessed it covered a British chieftain killed by the Romans. What is left today is a few small stones and some lumpy turf.
The name comes with a story. As the place-name scholar A. H. Smith recorded in 1961, the local folklore says the Devil was carrying stones in his apron for some great building project, tripped, and dropped the lot here. That is very likely the story people half-remember as the Devil throwing a stone near Sheffield. He didn’t throw it. He fell over.
The Sheffield dialect collector Sidney Oldall Addy, writing in 1888, knew an older version. For him the Apronful “preserves the memory of the Teutonic legends” in which giantesses, or even the Virgin Mary, “carry earth and rocks in their aprons, and, the strings of the aprons breaking, drop them on the ground.” In the old Norse and German stories, he said, a giant or giantess was going to build a church or a bridge, and as the stones were being carried through the air, the apron strings broke and “the stones came tumbling down”. The same story is told far from Yorkshire. In Somerset there were heaps called the “Devil’s lapfuls”, and at Winsford the Devil was said to have been bringing stones from a long way off to build a bridge over the Barle “when his apron string broke, and the stones fell where they now are.” Over the centuries, it seems, the giants’ loads were handed over to the Devil.
Giants’ churches and giants’ chairs
Addy found the giants elsewhere on the Sheffield moors too. On Han Kirk Hill (also An Kirk or Hound Kirk), he thought the name came from Anglo-Saxon enta, “of the giants”, making it a church built by giants, a hilltop “strown with great stones, which look as if they had been cast down or scattered here and there by some Titanic power.” Within half a mile, near Dore, was a rock called the Giant’s Chair, which he was sure was where “according to ancient belief, a giant sat enthroned”. Further south-west, between Baslow and Curbar, a partly paved road was called the Giant’s Causeway.
Hell Hole and the old names for the Devil
Sheffield has its own way into the underworld. A legend collected by the Paranormal Database puts an entrance to the lower world somewhere in the city, between Neepsend vicarage and Rutland Road. And Addy found a Hell Hole on the map: “a parte of Rivelin firth called Hell hole”, just below Bell Hagg, with a Hell Bank and a Hell Bank common nearby, and a lane leading from “Hallam head” down to it. Addy thought “hell” here might mean the grave, the place of the departed.
The local dialect had plenty of names for the Devil himself: Old Harry (which Addy took to mean “the old lord”, from Old Icelandic harri), the Old Lad, the Old One, Old Scrat, and, in the parish of Eckington, “owd Nicker”. Nicker goes back to the Anglo-Saxon nicor, a water-goblin, and there are fields called Near and Far Nicker Lands at Ridgeway running down to a stream, and a Nicker Wood that Addy thought was named for a monster, a water sprite, a goblin or the Devil. As he put it, “the gods of the heathen became the devils of Christianity”. More of the words are in the Sheffield dialect guide.
The Devil’s Arse
The biggest piece of diabolical geography in the Peak is under the hill at Castleton: Peak Cavern, with the largest natural cave entrance in Britain, long known as the Devil’s Arse. Domesday calls the place Pechesers, the Peak’s arse, and the 1911 Britannica records the suggestion that Péac was a local demon, possibly Puck. The full story is in why it’s called the Peak District.
The crooked spire, Chesterfield
Chesterfield’s church spire is twisted through 45 degrees, and its tip leans 9 feet 6 inches off centre. There are two Devil stories to explain it. In one, a Bolsover blacksmith shod the Devil badly, and the Devil, leaping over the spire in pain, kicked it out of shape. In the other, incense from the church drifted up and made the Devil sneeze so violently that the spire warped. The real cause is still argued over: unseasoned timber and too little bracing, heavy 17th-century lead sheeting on a 14th-century frame not built to carry it, and perhaps the sun heating one side of the lead more than the other.
The Devil’s Arrows and the Rudston stone
Outside Boroughbridge in North Yorkshire, three huge standing stones stand in a line, the tallest 22½ feet high, raised in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. There were once at least five. A legend recorded by 1721 says the Devil threw them from Howe Hill at the town of Aldborough, shouting “Borobrigg keep out o’ way, for Aldborough town I will ding down!”, and they fell short. In the East Riding, the Rudston Monolith, more than 25 feet high, is the tallest standing stone in the UK. The legend there is that the Devil threw it at All Saints Church and missed.
Both stones are thousands of years older than the town and the church they were supposedly thrown at, and the legends hand them to the Devil anyway.
From the Devil to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, has a name that sounds like it was dug out of one of Addy’s field lists. What it has in its landscape is older than any devil. Its rivers, the Dun, the Loxley and the Rivelin, are the three tails of Dunlockslyn, which Van Hallam calls d’divi, the divine. And its most diabolical name belongs to a cow: the demonspawn, which, as Pip Rippon points out, “is not a demon”. The giants and boggarts of the moors are in Peak District folklore and the boggart’s own entry, and Foked is the free solo RPG set in the same world. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: the Apronful of Stones, Watson, Hunter and A. H. Smith from The Northern Antiquarian; the giantesses, Han Kirk, the Giant’s Chair, the Giant’s Causeway, the Devil’s lapfuls, Hell Hole, Nicker and the names for the Devil from Sidney Oldall Addy’s Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield (1888); the Sheffield entrance to the underworld and Nicker Wood from the Paranormal Database; the Devil’s Arse from Wikipedia; the crooked spire from Wikipedia; the Devil’s Arrows from Wikipedia; the Rudston Monolith from Wikipedia, and its Devil legend from ON Magazine.
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