A murder stone is a marker set up at the exact spot where someone was killed — sometimes a purpose-shaped monument, sometimes just a boulder or a slab someone carved a few words into. It isn't a gravestone; the body is usually buried elsewhere, often in the nearest churchyard. A murder stone marks the place, not the person's rest.
The custom is mostly a British one, and mostly Georgian and Victorian, though a few stones on this site are older and a few are more recent. Raising one seems to have been part memorial, part public warning: carved with the victim's name, the date, and often a few lines of verse aimed squarely at whoever did it — especially when the killer was caught, tried, and hanged nearby, or never caught at all.
The wording follows a rough pattern more often than not: who was killed, when, sometimes how, and a moral rounding it off — a warning against drink, temper, or greed, or a line about the certainty of divine justice even where the earthly kind failed. Some are blunt to the point of bleakness. Others barely mention the crime at all, and what's known about them survives only in local memory or a newspaper archive, not on the stone itself.
Many haven't survived: ploughed under, broken up for a wall, moved when a road was widened, or quietly cleared by a landowner who didn't want a murder story attached to their field. The ones still standing tend to owe it to being just far enough off the beaten track, or to a parish that took a liking to its own local legend.
That's what this site is trying to track down — not just the well-known stones, but the ones a family history society mentioned in passing, or that only survive because someone photographed one on a walk and put it online. See the About page for more on how this archive is built.