On the north coast of St Mary a footpath runs down from the Priory Inn to a railed viewpoint over a great round pit in the cliff. At the bottom, the sea booms in and out through a cave mouth, and on rough days the noise and spray come right up the shaft. It is one of Jersey's most visited natural sights, and it has one of the island's most misleading names.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century nobody called it the Devil's Hole. Its Jersey names were Le Creux de Vis, the screw hole or spiral cave, and Le Creux de la Touraille. What changed things was a shipwreck. In 1851, according to both Jerripedia and the National Trust for Jersey, the French cutter La Joséphine, sailing from Cherbourg to St Malo, lost her way in thick fog and was wrecked right in front of the cave. Her figurehead was washed inside.
Someone saw an opportunity. A local carver, named in island accounts as Jean Giffard, reworked the salvaged figurehead into a horned devil, and it was set up above the hole. Victorian visitors loved it, and the name Devil's Hole stuck. The original wooden figure did not survive, but it was followed by a series of replacements through the twentieth century, the most recent standing in a pond near the Priory Inn.
One of those later devils had its own small story in 2020. The Jersey Evening Post reported that a 20-foot fibreglass Satan, known to the pub's owners Randalls as Derek, had been sitting in a warehouse since the company bought the Priory. When the warehouse moved, Randalls offered Derek free to a good home, expecting a dozen replies. About 170 people asked for him. He went, in the end, to an anonymous islander as a surprise present for a relative, with a donation to Jersey Cheshire Home.
There is no evidence of any older tradition of the Devil at this spot, and we have not found any ghost or sighting attached to it. It belongs here as a good example of how a legend can be manufactured in plain sight: a real wreck, a carved figure, and a name that now sounds as if it must be ancient.
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