Walking the coast road north from Gorey, past Mont Orgueil, you come to Anne Port, a small sandy bay, and above it a jutting shoulder of rock with a bench and a view out towards France. It is called Jeffrey's Leap, in older form Le Saut Geffroy.
Jerripedia describes it as reputedly an ancient place of execution, where condemned criminals were thrown from the rock into the sea, and adds that legend has those suspected of witchcraft pushed over the edge to die on the rocks below. The best-known story, retold by Visit Jersey, is the one that gives the place its name. Jeffrey had committed a crime (the Jersey CI Folklore blog suggests an assault on a woman, but that detail is not in the other versions) and was sentenced to be thrown off the high rock. A crowd gathered to watch. Jeffrey went over, hit the water, and to everyone's astonishment came up alive and swam to shore.
He should have left it there. Instead, full of himself, he announced that the leap was nothing and he would do it again to prove it. He jumped a second time, struck his head on the rocks at the bottom and was killed. The Jersey CI Folklore blog, and other modern retellings, say his ghost now haunts the rock, perhaps regretting that he tempted fate.
There is no historical documentation that anyone was ever executed here, and the claim about witches does not fit the island's actual record: Jersey Heritage's research on the witch trials describes the condemned being strangled or hanged and then burned, at the Market Place (now the Royal Square) and on seigneurial gallows. The leap story is a moral tale about pride. The ghost is a modern add-on with no witnesses attached.
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