In the churchyard at Llanarth, a village near Aberaeron, stands an early inscribed stone carved with a cross, with four circular holes at the point where the arms meet. Wirt Sikes wrote in 1880 that the country people called it the Devil's Stone, and gave the reason.
One stormy night there was such a tremendous noise in the church belfry that the whole village was thrown into alarm. Everyone agreed that nobody but the diawl could be making it, and they fetched the vicar from the vicarage to ask the intruder to leave. The vicar climbed the narrow winding stair of the tower with bell, book and candle, and there among the bells, as expected, was the devil in person. The vicar began the words of conjuration, and the fiend sprang up and escaped onto the leads of the tower roof. The vicar was not to be put off and followed him up. Hard pressed, the devil had nothing for it but to jump over the battlements.
He came down among the gravestones below and landed on the carved stone, and the four holes in it are the prints of his hands and knees. Sikes dated the stone to the twelfth century; it is an early medieval cross slab, and the holes are part of its carved design.
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