The Devil's Footprints: The Night Something Walked Across Devon

2026-07-05 · Enigmatic Places · 8 min read

On the morning of 9 February 1855, villagers across the east and south of Devon woke to fresh snow and a line of tracks that frightened them badly. Overnight, in the hard cold that followed a heavy fall around the Exe Estuary, a trail of hoof-like marks had appeared - each about four inches long and three across, set eight to sixteen inches apart, and running, most unnervingly of all, in single file. This was not the sprawling, four-footed clutter an animal leaves in snow. It was the steady, deliberate line of something that had walked upright through the dark, setting one print ahead of the next, as a man does. The shape itself was strangely neat: witnesses said each mark resembled the print of a small donkey's shoe, cleanly cut, as though the snow had been branded rather than trodden.

What turned unease into dread was where the marks were said to lead. Reports came in from more than thirty places across Devon - Exmouth, Topsham, Lympstone, Dawlish, Teignmouth, and, if later accounts are believed, as far south as Totnes and Torquay, with a couple more in Dorset. The trail's total length was estimated, wildly, at anywhere from forty to a hundred miles. The tracks crossed open gardens, and then - according to the accounts - climbed straight over high walls, passed across rooftops and haystacks, and resumed on the far side as though the barrier had meant nothing at all. One report had them stopping dead at a wall and beginning again inside a locked enclosure. Stranger still, the same line was said to appear on both banks of the Exe estuary, two miles of open tidal water that no walking creature could have crossed dry-shod. To people raised on sermons about a cloven hoof, the pattern did not read as an animal. It read as something that simply went wherever it wished, and let no wall or river tell it otherwise.

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