A Line in the Snow – Re‑examining the Devil’s Footprints of 1855

Footprints in the silence

At first light on Friday, 9 February 1855, villagers along the Exe Estuary in South Devon stepped into a landscape newly whitened by heavy snowfall and immediately felt the hush fracture. Hoof-shaped prints, crisp and evenly spaced, marched in often single-file lines across gardens, lane walls, and frozen rivers.

In perhaps the most baffling reports, they climbed rooftops, threaded narrow drainpipes, and even appeared on 14-foot-high walls, seemingly without disturbing the drifted powder around them.

Local newspapers, like Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, captured the immediate atmosphere, calling the uproar “an excitement worthy of the dark ages”. Within days, the phenomenon had a name that stuck: the Devil’s Footprints.⁶

Timeline and Geographic Scale

• 8 February 1855: Heavy snow falls across South Devon during the day. Crucially, several accounts mention a sequence later seen as vital for explanations: a brief thaw, possibly with rain, followed after midnight by a sharp drop in temperature and a hard frost.¹

• Early hours, 9 February: The mysterious footprints are formed during these hours.²

• From dawn, 9 February: Residents across numerous towns and villages discover the tracks. Reports emerge from at least thirty settlements, concentrated around the Exe Estuary including Exmouth, Lympstone, Topsham, Dawlish, and Teignmouth, but extending as far south as Totnes. Cumulative estimates of the tracks’ length run from forty to one hundred miles, though later research suggests this is likely an agglomeration of shorter, disconnected trails rather than one continuous path.³

• Mid-February: The mystery rapidly reaches the national press. The Times reports on 16 February of “a vast number of foot tracks of a most strange and mysterious description”. The Illustrated London News (ILN) follows on 24 February, publishing a detailed letter and an illustration that would fix the iconic “donkey’s hoof” image in the public mind.⁴

• March: Competing explanations fill newspaper letters pages. Sermons address the events, public meetings are held, and some accounts even mention armed search parties setting out to follow the spoor.⁵

Eyewitness Reports and Contradictions

Contemporary descriptions agree on some key points. Each mark often measured roughly 4 inches (10 cm) long by about 3 inches (7.6 cm) wide, looked somewhat like a donkey’s hoof or a cloven shoe, and lay eight to sixteen inches apart in stride.

Yet crucial variations and contradictions abound. Some observers saw claw tips, while others described a neat, almost concave impression. Several accounts even spoke of the prints appearing “branded” or “scorched” into the snow, as if made by a hot iron.

The pattern also varied. While the single-file progression (“foot had followed foot, in a single line”) was widely reported, particularly influencing the ILN‘s account, other observers noted alternating steps or parallel lines. Reverend H. T. Ellacombe, vicar of Clyst St George, meticulously documented prints on his lawn, noting they appeared sporadically, sometimes accompanied by “flurries” in the snow, leading him to speculate about large, ice-laden birds struggling for purchase.⁶

These contradictions matter immensely. If the trail were truly continuous and uniform, a single maker must have paced through the night at improbable speed, traversing impossible obstacles. Once broken into segments with varying characteristics, however, the field opens to multiple walkers, multiple causes, and the filtering lens of rumour and media amplification.

Adapted from an illustration in Mike Dash’s “The Devil’s Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855” (Fortean Studies, 1994).

Theories That Will Not Quite Settle

Supernatural Readings. For many rural Devonians, steeped in folklore associating the Devil with the local landscape and cloven hooves, hoof prints that ignored walls could only belong to Satan himself.

The local press reported widespread alarm and superstition. Some pulpits reportedly used the scare to swell congregations, while others, like Reverend G.M. Musgrave, attempted to quell panic, even resorting to fabricating a story about escaped kangaroos.⁷

Natural Causes Rational explanations quickly emerged, often relying on the specific weather conditions:

• Badgers: Championed by the eminent biologist Sir Richard Owen in the ILN, who argued their tracks could be enlarged and distorted by the thaw and refreeze. However, this struggled to explain tracks on high walls or rooftops.
• Wood mice/Rodents: Illustrated with diagrams by brewer Thomas Fox in the ILN, proposing that the combined impression of a hopping mouse’s four feet created the hoof-like shape. Modern researcher Mike Dash considers this a major contributor, especially for prints in inaccessible places like rooftops.
• Donkeys and Ponies: Countrymen knew that a shod donkey often walks in a near single-file line. Folklorist Theo Brown noted a broken shoe could yield a cloven look. This fits low-level trails but falters on drainpipes and walls.
• Birds: Besides Ellacombe’s ice-laden bird theory, others suggested cranes or swans, though the hoof shape remained problematic. Ellacombe reportedly sent drawings showing claws and samples of “white, grape-sized excrement” to scientists for analysis.
• Other Animals: Otters, cats, rats, foxes, and even frogs were proposed, highlighting the breadth of speculation.

All these natural theories rely heavily on the night’s unique meteorological recipe. A softening snow, then a flash freeze that fixed distorted prints into uncanny relief.

Hoax and Folklore in Action. Victorian pranksters certainly had motive and opportunity for localised tricks. Hot irons could potentially “brand” snow, and a straight garden wall made a ready stage. Yet no single joker, or even a small group, could convincingly seed dozens of villages with such extensive tracks before dawn.

More plausible is a patchwork. Isolated pockets of genuine animal activity, meteorological oddities, and perhaps some hoaxing, all stitched together by rumour and the press into a single wonder.

Musgrave’s deliberately false tale of escaped kangaroos serves as a potent object lesson in how quickly fabrication, even well-intentioned, could harden into accepted fact.

Modern Takes. Later decades added more eccentric possibilities. Author Geoffrey Household proposed an experimental naval balloon escaped from Devonport, trailing mooring shackles that bounced along the snow, based on an unverified family account.⁷

Recent documentaries and researchers have revisited the idea of an “alien big cat” or puma, arguing their prints can elongate and distort in melting snow. None disposes of every anomaly, and each inherits the same evidential gaps and contradictions that dog the Victorian theories.

Cultural and Religious Backdrop

Devon in the 1850s was a county in devotional flux. The Church of England faced challenges from rising Nonconformity (Methodists, Baptists), evidenced by the 1851 Religious Census.

Internal tensions existed within Anglicanism, alongside whispered anxieties about emerging scientific ideas that seemed to challenge traditional faith. Alongside formal religion, a rich local folklore persisted, furnishing devils, pixies, and spectral black dogs to explain the uncanny. When mysterious marks cropped up, the cultural landscape already held frameworks – both religious and folkloric – through which to interpret them.

Media Amplification and Myth-building

The power of the telegraph and the rapidly growing weekly illustrated press transformed scattered curiosities into a national spectacle. Editors and correspondents selected the most dramatic details, rooftop prints, drainpipe entrances, the alleged 100-mile march

Engravings in the popular Illustrated London News fixed the signature “donkey-shoe” image in popular memory, potentially overshadowing more varied descriptions. Newspaper letters columns then became an early, chaotic form of peer review, where theories about badgers, mice, and devils jostled for column inches without necessarily reaching consensus. The result was not clarity, but a legend robust enough to survive, and perhaps even thrive on, its own contradictions.

Enduring Fascination and Legacy

Subsequent winters have occasionally delivered reports of lookalike tracks, notably at Woolsery, North Devon in 2009, though none matched the scale or intensity of 1855.

Historians like Mike Dash, in his seminal 1994 analysis, treat the case as a complex palimpsest: part zoology, part meteorology, part social psychology, likely involving multiple causes including mice, other animals, and possibly hoaxes.⁷

Folklorists see a morality play about the boundaries of faith, evidence, and community belief. Fortean researchers, while acknowledging mundane explanations, keep a candle lit for the genuinely baffling elements – the high wall traverses, the “branded” marks – that still seem to shrug off easy explanation. The Devil’s Footprints survive as a potent reminder that mysteries can flourish in the space between what is observed, what is reported, and what is believed.

Why the Prints Still Matter

The 1855 scare endures precisely because it resists a single, tidy story.

Each proposed theory seems to fit neatly until forced to cover the entire, contradictory canvas, at which point it splits at the seams. What remains is a fascinating study in how communities construct meaning from ambiguous clues, how mass media can amplify wonder and shape narrative, and how, even in an age priding itself on steam and science, the ancient figure with cloven hooves could still find room to walk in the public imagination.

Sources and Further Reading

1. West Coast News – Devon, Cornwall and Somerset
2. Ancient Origins – Hoof-prints of the Devil Spotted in the Snow?
3. The Nashua Telegraph – The Devil’s Footprints appear in Devon, England
4. Old Corpse Road – The Devils Footprints
5. Center for Inquiry – Solving a Classic Mystery, Devil’s Footprints’
6. Peter Moore – The Curious Case of the Devil’s Foot-Prints
7. Mike Dash – 1994, Fortean Studies

What if the most unsettling mysteries aren’t the ones we fail to explain, but the ones we almost can?
Join the conversation by sharing your theory or experience with unexplained phenomena in the comments. You can also explore related cases in our Anomalies archive.