On the morning of 9 February 1855, people across a stretch of south Devon in England came out into fresh snow and found a line of marks that had not been there the night before.
The marks were shaped roughly like a small cloven hoof, about four inches long and rather less across. They ran in a single file — one print directly in front of the next, spaced around eight inches apart, with no left and right alternation of a normal animal gait.
And they went on. Not for a garden, but through a series of parishes on both sides of the Exe estuary, reportedly over a total distance of many miles.
What was reported
The best contemporary evidence comes from letters to *The Times* and the *Illustrated London News*, published in the weeks that followed, along with parish records and later correspondence collected by local clergymen and antiquarians.
The consistent elements across accounts are these.
- A single line of prints, unbroken by any sign of a second track
- Hoof-like or horseshoe-like in shape, some described as split, some as a closed U
- Regular spacing that did not vary with terrain
- The trail passed through gardens, fields, and yards without deviating
- It went over high walls rather than around them, continuing on the far side as if the obstacle were not there
- It was reported on rooftops, and across the tops of haystacks
- At least some accounts describe it approaching and resuming on the far side of the estuary
- In some places it reportedly approached a wall with a small drainpipe and continued beyond it
The last few of these are the ones that turned a curiosity into a legend. A fox does not cross a roof in a straight line. Nothing walks up one side of a two-metre wall and down the other without leaving marks on the wall.
The reaction
Devon in 1855 was cold, isolated, and devout. The winter had been unusually severe. Rural parishes were still close enough to older beliefs for the shape of the prints to carry an obvious implication, and it was drawn immediately: the Devil had walked through Devon in the night.
Some accounts describe villagers arming themselves with pitchforks and following the trail into the countryside, before turning back. Local clergy were divided between those who encouraged the interpretation and those who tried to calm it. The story reached the national press within a fortnight, and there it stayed.
The explanations
Nearly every proposed solution accounts for part of the phenomenon and fails on the rest.
Badgers, foxes, otters or cats. These leave tracks in a broadly linear pattern, and a fox's trail in particular can look like a single line. But no such animal crosses roofs and haystacks in an unbroken straight line for miles, and the prints described are not the right shape.
An escaped kangaroo. Two were reportedly kept in a private menagerie in the area. This suggestion appeared early and was ridiculed almost as early: kangaroos leave paired prints, and two of them do not produce a continuous line across two dozen parishes.
Mice or wood mice. In the twentieth century it was proposed that wood mice hopping in snow leave a hoof-like mark. This works for the shape at small scale but not for the distances or the reported obstacles.
Hot air balloon trailing a mooring rope. A shackled rope dragging across the landscape would bounce, producing regularly spaced marks in a nearly straight line irrespective of walls, roofs and water. This is the most mechanically satisfying explanation for the trail's indifference to terrain. The objection is that no such balloon flight was ever documented, an uncontrolled balloon over inhabited country would have been seen, and it would very likely have caught on something.
Frozen hydrogen or vented steam from a testing establishment. Occasionally proposed, never evidenced.
Weather and thaw. A widely underrated explanation. Meteorological conditions that night involved snowfall followed by partial melting and refreezing. Melting can enlarge and distort a track, and dripping water from eaves and branches can produce regular round marks. This may explain a proportion of what people saw — but not the reported continuity across obstacles.
Multiple ordinary causes plus a story. The most plausible modern reading. Different animals, drips, and thaw distortion created hoof-like marks in many places across a wide area on the same snowy night. Once the story spread — and it spread fast, in a region primed to receive it — people who found any odd mark in their own yard added it to the same trail. What was actually a scattered set of unremarkable phenomena became, in the retelling, a single continuous track.
What the evidence can and cannot support
The problem for every explanation, including the sceptical one, is the quality of the record.
Nobody photographed the prints; photography existed but was not portable enough for a village yard in 1855. The surviving drawings were made later and vary. No single witness followed the whole route; the "miles" figure is assembled from separate reports in separate parishes, and the assumption that they belong to one continuous trail is an assumption, not an observation. The most spectacular details — the estuary crossing, the drainpipe — appear in the later and more distant accounts rather than the earliest ones, which is the classic signature of a story growing in transmission.
At the same time, the sceptical reading has a weakness of its own. A great many people in a great many parishes reported the same distinctive shape and spacing on the same morning, and they were rural people who knew perfectly well what fox and badger tracks looked like.
Why it endures
The Devil's Footprints survive as a story because they sit in the narrow band where a mystery is most durable: enough documentary evidence to be taken seriously, not enough to be resolved.
They are also a near-perfect case study in how events become legends. There was almost certainly something to see on that morning. What there was not, in all likelihood, was a single unbroken hundred-mile track — but the version with the single unbroken track is the one that has been retold for a hundred and seventy years, because it is the better story.
The short version
In February 1855, hoof-shaped prints appeared in snow across parts of Devon, reportedly running for miles over walls, roofs and water in a single unvarying line. Explanations range from badgers to balloons to thaw distortion, and none covers all the reported features. The most likely truth is that several ordinary causes were stitched into one extraordinary trail by a frightened, cold and highly religious countryside — but the documentary record is not good enough to prove even that.
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