Bloody Place Names: Do Britain's Battle Names Mark Real Battles?

Britain's map is full of grim names: Battle, Bloody Meadow, Slaughter, Dead Man's Hill, Gallows Hill. Do such names mark the sites of real fights? I searched the 267,744 natural and settlement features in OS Open Names for twelve grim words and found 756 matching names. I measured each name's distance to the nearest of 507 battles and sieges in Great Britain with a coordinate in Wikidata, and compared it with 2,000 sets of ordinary OS names of the same feature type drawn from the same 50 km grid square. Only 42 of the names (5.6%) lie within 2 km of a recorded event, and 58% lie more than 10 km from any. One word stands out: 11 of 58 Battle names lie within 2 km of a recorded battle or siege, against 2.3 expected from matched names, and the result holds when the event list or the baseline is changed. Bloody names show a weaker link that does not survive correction for multiple testing. Gallows names sit closer to events than matched names, but much of this disappears when the baseline is also matched on distance to towns. Kill, Dead Man, Murder, Hangman, Gibbet, Soldier, War, Red Bank and Slaughter names are indistinguishable from chance at 2 km. Upper and Lower Slaughter, about 4.9 km from the Battle of Stow-on-the-Wold, illustrate the trap: cited sources derive their name from an Old English word for wet land. As a group, most grim place names do not mark recorded battles. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/bloody-place-names/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/bloody-place-names. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/bloody-place-names/.