The Devil's Footprints: The Night Something Walked Across Devon
Heavy snow fell across the east and south of Devon on the night of 8 February 1855, followed by a hard frost. On the morning of 9 February, villagers around the Exe estuary went out into the white and found a line of tracks that frightened them badly. The marks were hoof-like, each about four inches long and three across, set eight to sixteen inches apart, and they ran in single file. The shape was strangely neat. Witnesses said each print resembled the mark of a small donkey's shoe, cleanly cut, as though the snow had been branded rather than trodden.
The single file was the detail that unsettled people most. An animal moving through snow leaves a sprawling four footed clutter. This was a steady, deliberate line, one print set ahead of the next, the way a walking man leaves a trail.
Reports came in from more than thirty places across the county, among them Exmouth, Topsham, Lympstone, Dawlish and Teignmouth. Later accounts placed marks as far south as Totnes and Torquay, with a couple more in neighbouring Dorset. Estimates of the total length of the trail ranged wildly, from about forty miles to a hundred. The reporting parishes are scattered across a broad band of country running from the Exe estuary south west toward the Teign and the Dart, which is part of why the estimates differ so much. The figure depends entirely on which reports are strung together into one trail.
What the tracks were said to do was stranger than where they went. According to the accounts, they crossed open gardens and then climbed straight over high walls, passed across rooftops and haystacks, and resumed on the far side as though the barrier had meant nothing. One report described them stopping dead at a wall and beginning again inside a locked enclosure. The same line was reported on both banks of the Exe estuary, two miles of open tidal water that no walking creature could have crossed dry shod.
The written descriptions vary, and the most striking details come from the most emphatic correspondents. Some insisted the prints were spaced with an uncanny regularity, always the same eight inches apart, never breaking stride, never doubling back, holding a straight line for miles. Others swore the marks looked scorched, the snow melted cleanly at their edges as though a hot iron had been pressed into it, which is why the word branded keeps returning in the letters. Whole households described waking to find the trail running up to a door or a wall, pausing there, and carrying calmly on. A few writers claimed the impressions showed the faint scratch of claws or a small round heel.
Nothing was photographed. Photography existed in 1855, but not in the hands of Devon villagers on a February morning, and the thaw came within days. Everything that survives of the physical evidence is second hand: measurements taken with a ruler or paced out by eye, sketches drawn from memory or copied from a neighbour's drawing, and the outlines the Illustrated London News engraved from readers' letters. No naturalist who later wrote about the case had ever seen a single print.
The fear on the ground was not an invention. In some parishes men reportedly took up guns and clubs and went out in bands to follow the trail, half expecting to corner whatever had made it. Devon in 1855 was a county raised on sermons about a cloven hoof, and the pattern did not read to those villagers as an animal. It read as something that went wherever it wished and let no wall or river tell it otherwise. The name that stuck, the Devil's Footprints, is a fossil of that week's mood.
The press seized on the story. The Times printed an account on 16 February 1855, and the Illustrated London News gave over weeks of its columns to letters, sketches and competing explanations, with naturalists, clergymen and readers arguing in print about what could leave such a mark. Within a month the case had become a national controversy rather than a local fright.
The documentary record is thinner than the legend suggests. Almost everything we have comes from a bundle of letters kept by Henry Thomas Ellacombe, vicar of Clyst St George, which only surfaced after the Devonshire Association printed an appeal for information in 1950, long after the last witness had died. The surviving accounts do not agree with one another. As the investigator Joe Nickell has pointed out, the size, the spacing and even the shape of the prints shift from one telling to the next. Some of the widest claims are later still: R. H. Busk, writing in Notes and Queries in 1890, was the one who stretched the trail as far as Weymouth in Dorset and even to Lincolnshire, a hundred and fifty miles away. No systematic inquiry was made while the witnesses were alive. The Devonshire Association's appeal went out ninety five years after the morning it was asking about.
One plain fact constrains everything else. Nobody could have physically walked a hundred mile course in the handful of daylight hours available before the snow began to soften and slump, which means no single person ever saw the trail from beginning to end. What the public took for one continuous line was a chain of separate sightings in separate parishes, linked only by the assumption that they belonged to the same walker. Dozens of anxious people in dozens of scattered villages each described their own short stretch of marked snow on the same cold morning, and the newspapers sewed the fragments together.
The phenomenon has not entirely stopped. In 2009 a woman in Woolsery, in north Devon, found a line of similar prints in her garden after snow and reported them. A naturalist who examined the marks leaned toward field mice while conceding frankly that the trail was genuinely odd. A century and a half on, the same shapes appear and the same careful shrug follows them.
Conclusions and Open Questions
The explanations began within days and have never stopped multiplying. The eminent anatomist Sir Richard Owen, working from the newspaper descriptions alone and never seeing a print, pronounced the maker a badger, whose plantigrade tread and overlapping steps can leave a rounded, hoof-like mark. The weakness is obvious: a badger does not walk a hundred miles in one night, and Owen was diagnosing text rather than evidence. The Illustrated London News proposed rodents as early as March 1855, noting that wood mice bounding through deep snow press their hind feet together into a single shape that can look cloven. That accounts for the form of the marks but not for a neat line running for miles.
A rumour ran that kangaroos had escaped from a private menagerie near Sidmouth. The Reverend G. M. Musgrave, vicar of Withycombe Raleigh, later admitted he had helped spread that story deliberately, to steer frightened parishioners away from talk of the devil, which makes it a pastoral tactic rather than a finding. Other naturalists offered otters, swans dragging their webbed feet, herons stalking along a hedge, even a stray pony that had cast a shoe. Each candidate explains one kind of mark and none explains the whole reported trail. A deliberate hoax has its advocates too, and its own difficulty: no prankster could easily coordinate thirty villages into telling the same story on the same morning.
The novelist Geoffrey Household passed on a claim that an experimental balloon had drifted loose from Devonport Dockyard, trailing two shackles on its mooring ropes that dabbed hoof-like dents across the county. It is an ingenious idea that rests on a single second hand recollection, and it would require a runaway balloon that somehow steered itself in a dead straight line over walls, rooftops and two miles of estuary.
The most thorough treatment remains the folklorist Mike Dash's 1994 study in Fortean Studies. His conclusion was that there was no single source: some marks were probably hoaxes, some were made by ordinary quadrupeds such as donkeys, ponies and cats, and some by wood mice, and no one cause could account for all of them across so wide an area in so short a time. Even Dash conceded that this tidy dissolution cannot explain every reported mark, and that the mystery remains.
Some argue the real engine was the weather. On this reading, snow that thawed at the edges and refroze overnight enlarged and rounded every ordinary print into something no naturalist could name, and a population primed by the pulpit supplied the rest. One theory holds that the true subject of the case is not the snow but the record: that the trail was assembled after the fact, by the press and then by memory, out of unrelated tracks reported by badly frightened people. Both readings fit the evidence, and neither can be tested.
What remains unexplained is specific. Why were identical marks reported on both banks of a two mile tidal estuary on the same morning? What made the snow at the edges of the prints look burned? Why did so many independent witnesses, before the press had drawn its conclusions, describe the same single file spacing? And how much of the hundred mile march ever existed outside the newspapers? The marks were real and the terror was real. The line connecting them was drawn by human beings, and the one witness who could settle the case, the snow itself, melted into the Exe a hundred and seventy years ago.