Murder Stones is a small, ongoing attempt to build a public record of murder stones — the inscribed markers raised at the exact spot of a killing, scattered across the British countryside and, occasionally, further afield.
I was inspired to create this after watching this excellent video by 'Past and Curious' and finding there was no map of these stones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyo6aIwbUNg&t=639s
Definitely take a look at the video to learn more
Most of what's here has been pieced together from local history societies, parish records, old newspaper archives, and photographs. Some entries are well documented; others rest on a single uncorroborated source and are marked as such.
You will find some things listed which are not in the UK, or not truly murder stones, but were too interesting to leave out!
This is a volunteer, best-effort project — not an academic or definitive one. If you know more about a stone listed here, or know of one that isn't, please get in touch using the form on the homepage. Please let us know if you think anything could be improved about the site, we would love to make it more of a community in time!
How we built the site
For Techies: The site is a static site with a custom site builder that runs locally on my machine. All of the data is stored offline and is therefore more secure. The site templates were built using Claude Code, as was the site builder, to my chosen architecture.
Research: The preliminary research was done by taking all of the easily available sources and using Claude AI to follow up all of the leads, with an emphasis on looking for primary sources. I then used the AI to summarise the story and list the sources. There have been many runs at different pieces of data I have found, and many attempts to organise it properly. The starting points include Wikipedia, Geograph, Historic England etc, but also mining local history pages, Facebook Groups, Reddit posts etc. You will see many pages note faults or list further research which either needs a payment or an in person visit to an archive. This is deliberate, we want the site to be honest about what is and isn't known, and invite our community to follow up on items we have not got to yet. So far this technique has uncovered a large number of stones that were not formerly listed anywhere, but we would love to have humans investigate the sources and confirm a final write up! AI is just an expedient to get this site up and running and to seek out new sources at a rate humans could not.