The Devil’s Leap

The Devil, it turns out, once lost an argument and dropped a boulder in a strop. That is the sort of local history we deserve more of.

Walk along to Roulston Scar and you are standing on a summit 1,246 feet above the level of the sea, with the Vale of York and the Vale of Mowbray spread before you, and the West Riding and the Cumberland Hills visible in the distance on a clear day. Between the Scar and the cone of Hood Hill sits a stretch of ground with a name that does not muck about: the Devil’s Leap.

The legend behind it is properly odd. Christian missionaries arriving in Yorkshire sought out the hidden retreats of Druidism, and one of them challenged the Druidical priest to a public contest to settle which religion deserved worship. The Devil turned up disguised as that priest, stood on a rock at the foot of Roulston Crag, and lost the debate. Sore losers apparently flee with the furniture. He fled across the valley with the stone stuck to his foot, the heat melting a hole in it, until he reached Hood Hill and dropped the boulder there.

That stone is not folklore embroidery. A boulder weighing sixteen to twenty tons still sits on Hood Hill’s ridge, marked with something like a large footprint, and nobody has explained how it got there.

Hood Hill kept collecting stories after that, though one of them belongs down the road. The wandering monks have been placed on the hill itself, but the settled view now points to Hood Grange instead, the spot covered in yesterday’s post. A hermitage stood there before 1138, and monks moved in under Roger de Mowbray’s patronage, before shuffling off to Old Byland after five years. Robin Hood, at least, still gets to keep the hill to himself, after three hundred soldiers sent by Henry the Second defeated his outlaws there.

One hill. A demon, some monks, and an outlaw. Somebody ought to put up a plaque, though it would need to be a very long one.

Source: “THE DEVIL’S LEAP.—A HAMBLETON LEGEND.” Malton Messenger –25 September 1880. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0004716/18800925/043/0003