Where the Devil Lives: Devil Place Names, Prehistoric Monuments and Saints in Britain

Devil's Dyke, the Devil's Punch Bowl, the Devil's Arrows and Devil's Bridge are the best known of Britain's places given to the Devil. It is often said that the Devil gets the strange old things in the landscape, the prehistoric stones and earthworks and the steep, unsettling ground, while the saints get the springs and churches. I test this on the open map of Great Britain. I collected all 107 features in OS Open Names and OS Open Rivers whose names contain Devil, the Scots Deil or a Gaelic word for the devil, and 393 saint-named natural features as a Christian counterpart. Each was compared with 50 ordinary features of the same OS type from the same 50 km square and with random land, using 2,000 replicate control sets. 31% of Devil names lie within 1 km of a recorded barrow, megalith or hillfort, against 19% of matched places (chance below 0.001); saint names show no such excess but lie near churches (47% within 1 km against 31%) and holy wells (13% within 2 km against 4%), which Devil names do not. Devil names are on slightly steeper ground than matched places but no more broken, and show no affinity for county boundaries. The largest class of names gives the Devil domestic property: a kitchen, a chair, a frying pan, bellows. A separate set of 23 named Devil monuments is mostly prehistoric, but where the names can be dated they first appear between 1687 and 1765. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/devils-britain/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/devils-britain. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/devils-britain/.