The practice of tombstoning seems to have originated in the UK’s West Country, and the expression is still used mainly in British English. Its origins may possibly relate back to 1995 newspaper reports of people jumping off Tombstone Rock near Wembury, a village on the South coast of Devon. Though tombstoning started out as a playful nickname for the craze, it has a sombre appropriateness, since several people in the UK have died doing it (a tombstone is a large stone which is put over the place where a dead person is buried).

The practice of tombstoning seems to have originated in the UK’s West Country, and the expression is still used mainly in British English. Its origins may possibly relate back to 1995 newspaper reports of people jumping off Tombstone Rock near Wembury, a village on the South coast of Devon. Though tombstoning started out as a playful nickname for the craze, it has a sombre appropriateness, since several people in the UK have died doing it (a tombstone is a large stone which is put over the place where a dead person is buried).