Jay’s Grave

The wind never rests on Dartmoor. It sweeps across the tors, rattles through gorse and bracken, and moans over the desolate roads where ghosts linger in the folds of the land. Near Swallerton Gate, on the way to Hound Tor, there is a grave—just a simple mound of earth, easily overlooked, but never bare of flowers. No one knows who leaves them. No one admits to tending the spot. But the story of Mary Jay—or Kitty Jay, as she is now known—has outlived the centuries, whispered from moorland travellers to village innkeepers, from ramblers to wide-eyed children on stormy nights. She was an orphan, a girl cast into a world that had no kindness for her. Despair led her to a noose, and the laws of her time cast her out of consecrated ground. They buried her at the crossroads, where suicides were laid to keep their souls from wandering. But it did not work. On mist-laden nights, those who pass her grave swear they see a shadow shifting, or hear a sigh carried on the wind. The flowers never wilt. The legend never fades. And some say that, when the moon is high and the moor is quiet, Kitty Jay still walks.