Rocqueberg is a rounded outcrop of rose-coloured granite on the south-east coast of Jersey, in the parish of St Clement near Green Island. Today it sits among bungalows and gardens, a strange lump of rock that most drivers on the coast road pass without looking at.
It has the strongest witch tradition of any single place in the island. Jersey Heritage quotes a guidebook of the 1940s which says the witches 'used to dance on it during the Sabbath', and records the belief that they gathered there to raise storms by their singing and so cause wrecks. St Clement fishermen had a remedy: the thirteenth fish of the catch was thrown onto the rock as they passed, to keep the weather kind. The Jersey Evening Post's 2022 feature with Jersey Heritage's archives director Linda Romeril repeats the same custom and calls Rocqueberg the place where witches gathered on the Sabbath. Visit Jersey adds that a mark on one part of the rock is the Devil's hoofprint.
There is also a romance attached to the rock. In the version on Visit Jersey, a young man found himself in an enchanted wood near Rocqueberg, dancing with beautiful young women, and kept going back. His fiancée followed him one night with a crucifix, and when she held it up the dancers turned into old hags and vanished. Spooky Isles names the pair Hubert and Madeleine and adds that Hubert's ghost still comes back to the rock hoping to dance again; that last detail appears only in that one retelling.
The folklore sits on top of a real and grim history. Jersey held at least 65 witch trials between the 1560s and 1660s, with 33 executions, and the belief that witches met at particular rocks on the island is exactly the kind of thing those trials heard. The name Le Rocher des Fées, recorded in the Jersey Evening Post's guide to fairy folklore, shows the same place could be home to fairies as well as witches. Jersey Heritage holds the early twentieth-century postcard by Violet M. Roberts that shows the witches on the rock.
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