Country diary: Welcome to the hill where anything, it seems, can happen | Amy-Jane Beer

Hood Hill, North Yorkshire: From Satanic slip-ups to postwar plane crashes, stories have accumulated on this summit, just one part of an already rich landscape There’s something special about Hood Hill, I tell my son Lochy as we begin climbing. It’s not just the pleasing symmetry, pointy summit and epic view. Not just that it has intriguing medieval earthworks and weird erratic boulders dumped long ago by wandering glaciers. It’s more that this hill, and the moor-edge landscape it is part of – including Whitestone Cliff, Lake Gormire, Roulston Scar, various caves, a gap known as the Devil’s Stride and the more recent Kilburn White Horse – seem to spawn stories. We’ve come today on the trail of one recorded by the folklorist Thomas Gill in 1852. Of a particularly distinctive rock that sits on the Hood Hill summit ridge, known as the Altar Stone, Gill’s local informants told him that it had started out at Roulston, where druids once used it for sacred and grisly rituals. When early Christian missionaries arrived, the story goes, Satan himself showed up, so rageful that when he landed on the stone, his foot seared into it. When he leapt away, the stone went with him, before falling to