The Bloody Stone (Hawk Stone)

Found via a Heritage Gateway full-text search for 'murder stone'. A large red boulder on the pedestrian footway of the A49 Mill Lane, Newton-le-Willows - formerly known as the Hawk Stone, now generally called the Bloody Stone - said to mark a killing connected to Sir William Bradshaigh of Haigh and his wife Lady Mabel, whose tomb effigies are the subject of the famous 'Mab's Cross' legend (a separate monument in Wigan, about the same family, not included here as it doesn't itself mark a killing). WHICH KILLING THE STONE ACTUALLY MARKS IS GENUINELY UNRESOLVED, and sources here disagree: (1) St Helens Borough Council's own Local List entry follows the LEGEND version - that Sir William Bradshaigh himself murdered a Welsh knight here, the man his wife had bigamously married while believing him dead - and the 19th-century local historian William Beamont likewise linked the stone to 'the Welsh Knight' story. (2) Heritage Gateway's Historic England Research Record instead follows the REALITY established by Rev. Thomas C. Porteus's wartime research (published by the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society) - that Sir William Bradshaigh was himself murdered near Newton-le-Willows on 16 August 1333, almost certainly for political reasons connected to the 1315 Banastre Rebellion he had taken part in against the Earl of Lancaster's faction, and that the romantic 'bigamous Welsh knight' story is a much later literary invention with no basis in the historical record. Per the Wigan Archaeological Society's detailed account of Porteus's findings, the earliest print version of the Mab's Cross legend only appears in 1647 (the Bradshaigh Roll), three centuries after the real killing, and was popularised much further by Sir Walter Scott's use of it in 'Waverley' (1814) and 'The Betrothed' (1825). A separate, apparently unconnected local tradition (per a passing Facebook comment, not otherwise corroborated here) associates the stone instead with the nearby 1648 Battle of Winwick/Red Bank - worth checking but not investigated further here.