Gallows Hill: Where Britain Put Its Execution Places

Hundreds of hills, woods and fields in Great Britain are still named after gallows and gibbets. Where were these execution places put? I searched the 267,744 natural and settlement features in OS Open Names and found 340 Gallows and Gibbet names, 67% of them hills. For each I measured height above the surrounding ground, slope, distance to the nearest town and village, line of sight from the nearest town, distance to modern A-roads and Roman roads, and distance to modern and approximate Domesday boundaries. Each name was compared with 50 ordinary names of the same feature type from the same 50 km square, with names also matched on distance to town, and with random land points, using 2,000 replicate control sets. Gallows and Gibbet names lie within 3 km of a town 31.5% of the time, against 15.1% for matched names, but rarely inside settlements, unlike village stocks and pillories. 29.1% lie within 500 m of an A-road, against 16.6% for matched names and 19.0% for names matched on distance to town. They stand on raised ground, but Gallows hills are less prominent than other named hills, a gap that comes mostly from Scotland. They are somewhat more often in sight of the nearest town, largely because they are closer to it. Evidence for siting on boundaries is weak at the resolution available. Hanging names, often taken to mean a steep slope, are indeed steep and show none of these patterns. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/gallows-hill/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/gallows-hill. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/gallows-hill/.