The stone itself is real and old: a rough, waist-high block of stone set in a field beside St Mary's Parish Church in Marston Moretaine, generally dated to the Neolithic period and one of relatively few standing stones known in this part of England. Like most ancient stones with no surviving record of who raised them or why, it has attracted an explanatory legend that has nothing to do with its actual prehistoric origin and everything to do with the church that later grew up beside it.
The story told locally has the Devil roaming the fields around Marston Moretaine, his patience worn thin by the nearby church, until one Sunday he came across some local children breaking the Sabbath with a game of leapfrog. Rather than punish them he is said to have joined in, and got so carried away that he opened up a hole in the ground and all of them, Devil included, vanished into it, never to be seen again. The stone is said to mark the spot where this happened. A variant version trims the story down to a simpler image: the Devil hopping and skipping away from the church, a toenail torn off in the process and left behind as the stone, which is where the popular name comes from.
Local historians who have looked into the site note that there may once have been more than one such stone in the area, with a second stone bearing the same 'Devil's Toenail' nickname reported a few hundred yards away near Station Road, raising the possibility that the legend originally attached to a small cluster of stones rather than a single monument, most of which have since been lost or moved. As folklore goes, this is a fairly clean example of a later Christian-era story being layered onto a genuinely ancient, unexplained monument, the Devil serving as a convenient explanation for something nobody in the historical period actually understood.
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