Jay's Grave - WikiHQ

Jay's Grave (or Kitty Jay's Grave) is supposedly the last resting place of a suicide victim who is thought to have died in the late 18th century and denied burial within consecrated ground, a standard practice for suicide victims at the time.

Folklore

Since it was first set down in the late 19th century, the story attached to the grave has changed and has been greatly embellished.

Early references

An early newspaper account of the discovery of the grave appears on page 5 of the North Devon Journal for 23 January 1851, under "County Intelligence":

In 1876 Robert Dymond edited and published a book entitled "Things Old and New" Concerning the Parish of Widecombe-in-the-Moor and its Neighbourhood which contains the following:

In a reply to Doveton's enquiry that was published later the same month, P. F. S. Amery quoted the above passage from Dymond and added some extra information:

Twenty years later, in the first volume of Devon Notes and Queries (1900–01), W. H. Thornton, who identified himself as the rector of North Bovey, asked:

In reply to this enquiry P. F. S. Amery, who was by now one of the editors of Devon Notes and Queries, wrote:

In a map from 1905, the grave appears as Jane's Grave.

In 1909, William Crossing, in his Guide to Dartmoor repeated Amery's report, though he named the suicide as "Kitty Jay, as she used to be spoken of", and amended the location of the incident to "Canna, a farm not far from the foot of East Down".

The Dartmoor author Beatrice Chase wrote about the legend in her 1914 novel The Heart of the Moor, and claimed in a prefixed publisher's note that the events it describes are true.

Because there is no inscription on the grave she sets out to discover whose it might be. After asking several locals and searching maps and guidebooks without success, she eventually finds that "Granny Caunter" knows the story: