The Devil’s Footprints

Daily Express (9th February, 2005)

The bitter winter of 1855 turned southern Britain into an icy wasteland of death. The frail froze in their beds, thousands were laid off work and bread riots erupted in towns isolated by heavy snow. This was the ‘Crimean Winter’ - an uncertain, fearful, time.

Cold and hunger were one thing but on the morning of Friday February 9th events in a quiet corner of Devon took a sinister – even supernatural – turn. Villagers awoke to a new fall of snow bearing strange tear-drop shaped tracks. Some said they looked like the mark of a cloven-hoof.

These were tracks that defied gravity and walked impossible paths. Tracks too large and unusual to blame solely on animals. Tracks that wound between villages and remote farms to create a trail 100 miles long. Soon the whispers were everywhere. This was no mortal being. These were the Devil’s Footprints. Lucifer himself was abroad…taunting folk in their darkest hour.

Today, on the 150th anniversary of this bizarre mystery, it’s easy to dismiss it as the superstitious scare-mongering of simple, rural souls psychologically worn down by malnutrition. No scientific study was ever made. The Church had a vested interest. Witnesses would have exaggerated, even lied, to grab attention.

All true…and yet something very odd unquestionably did happen that bitter February night in villages scattered around the Exe and Teign rivers south of Exeter. For weeks it dominated national newspaper letters columns – vying with the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale’s heroics – yet to this day it has never been properly explained.

It seems the footprints, made between the last fall of snow at midnight and 6am, when villages came to life, were discovered simultaneously in a thirty-by-ten-mile area. This is roughly bounded by Bicton in the east, Clyst St Mary in the north, across the Exe to Mamhead and Bishopsteignton and south as far as Barton, near Torquay.

However with so many roads snowbound, news travelled slowly. Eventually, on February 17th a local paper, Woolmer’s Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, published the first report. Ominously, it noted the creature’s ‘power of ubiquity’ adding that ‘…the poor are full of superstition and consider it little short of a visit from Old Satan or some of his imps’.

Six days later The Times referred to ‘the marks of Satan’ and added: ‘…that great excitement has been produced among all classes may be judged from the fact that the subject has been descanted on from the pulpit.’ People were ‘actually afraid to go outside their doors at night.’

On 24 February the Illustrated London News weighed in with an attempt to explain why the ‘Great Devon Mystery’ couldn’t be attributed to farm or wild animals. The marks were four inches by two, like a donkey’s hoof, but whereas a donkey would have made double prints, the ‘Devil’s’ appeared in a single line some eight inches apart. Every parish reported the same size print and stride. Struggling for a description, many witnesses said they seemed ‘branded in the snow’.

There were other, equally baffling, features: ‘This mysterious visitor generally only passed once down or across each garden or courtyard,’ wrote the ILN correspondent, ‘…as also in the farms scattered about: this regular track passing in some instances over the roofs, over houses and hayricks, and very high walls (one fourteen feet) without displacing the snow on either side or altering the distance between the feet, and passing on as if the wall had not been any impediment.’

The writer concluded: ‘It is very easy for people to laugh at these appearances and account for them in an idle way [but] no known animal could have traversed this extent of country in one night, beside having to cross an estuary of the sea two miles broad…’

A donkey is one thing. But one that gambols across rooftops and walks through walls?

By now south Devon was a cauldron of fear, rumour and wild speculation. Search parties armed with ‘guns and bludgeons’ were despatched from Dawlish to follow the trail. Fishermen spoke of prints emerging from the sea at Teignmouth. Farmers found them in the middle of fields – yet no sign of the creature entering. Householders reported how the beast walked through impossibly narrow drains and alighted on second-storey window sills. Doors were barricaded at night.

Writing later in Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries the daughter of the Vicar of Dawlish, Henrietta Fursdon, told of worried curates, churchwardens and parishioners hammering on her father’s door for guidance.

‘I myself remember distinctly seeing the footprints,’ she wrote, ‘and my terror as a child of the unknown wild beast that might be lurking about, and the servants [who] would not go out after dark to shut outer doors.’

Some churchmen took advantage of the febrile mood, claiming that the ‘Devil’ had singled out followers of the priest Edward Pusey. At the time Pusey had been trying to re-introduce Catholic ritual into the Church of England and controlled a handful of Devon parishes.

‘Some people say it is sent as a warning to the Puseyites,’ the Western Times gleefully reported, ‘hence it is that the “phenomenon” has visited the Puseyite parishes of Woodbury, Topsham and Littleham-cum-Exmouth. In this place it has traversed the churchyard – and even to the very door of the vestibule.’ Conveniently, the article ignores footprints in Protestant parishes.

While the masses shivering outside soup kitchens could be dismissed as unreliable, evidence from the educated classes was harder to discredit. Among the witnesses was General Edward Mortlake Studd - called from lunch to inspect tracks in the garden of his home, Oxton House, at Mamhead.

The leading investigator however was the Rev H. T. Ellacombe, Rector of Clyst St George, and a leading authority on church bells. His work on the Devil’s Footprints was discovered some 40 years ago by Exeter University research fellow and folklorist Theo Brown in a box of old parish papers. It included a hastily-written copy of a letter to the ILN , which Rev Ellacombe asked should not be published.

‘There is no doubt as to the facts – that thousands of these marks were seen on the snow on the morning of the 9th extending over many miles,’ he wrote. It was ‘as if the snow had been branded with a hot iron – or the form of such a shoe had been cut out with a knife – to the ground, which was everywhere visible, tho’ the snow in the middle part did not appear to be touched.’

Rev Ellacombe refers to a brief thaw after the snow, followed by more freezing temperatures, and reveals he found tracks on his own lawn. ‘My dog barked that night and so did the dogs of my neighbours…There is scarcely a field or orchard or Garden where they were not – all in a single line.’

The vicar sent various drawings of footprints (and a sample of ‘white, grape-sized excrement’) to the renowned naturalist Sir Richard Owen and the Oxford professor Dr I A Ogle. One of the sketches included claws, which Sir Richard believed might have been a badger. The vicar’s own theory was that birds’ feet had become iced up, leaving single prints in the snow.

Which brings us to the nub of the mystery – just what did cause the Devil’s Footprints. Theo Brown’s work uncovered dozens of theories, from laudable to ludicrous. The main ones are listed below.

It was a donkey or pony: An obvious favourite, not least because iron shoes tended to break in the middle – leaving prints with a cloven appearance. Verdict: Such tracks were hardly new to rural eyes. And how did the animal travel so far, so fast, skipping across roofs and window sills?

It was an escaped kangaroo. Curiously a kangaroo did escape from ‘Mr Fisher’s private zoo’ at Sidmouth just before February 8th and was later shot at Teignmouth. Verdict: Tail marks would be a giveaway.

It was some other animal. Take your pick from badger, otter, squirrel, fox, rat, cat, bird-with-frozen-feet, crane, great bustard, seagull, Newfoundland dog, duck, escaped raccoon and – a real outsider – migratory eels. Verdict: Some of these creatures might have made some prints. But they couldn’t reasonably explain them all.

It was a hoax. Pranksters used a heated horseshoe tied to a stick. There probably were some pranksters (especially around the Puseyite churches) but they must have worked hard to cover 100 miles in six hours. Verdict: You’d expect to find the odd human footprint.

It was a top-secret military experiment. A thoroughbred of the conspiracy stable this theory emerged in a local newspaper letters column. An experimental balloon was apparently released from the Devenport (correct) Dockyard at Plymouth trailing shackles on the ends of two ropes. It drifted northeast, lost height and bounced around leaving strange marks. The Navy hushed it up because greenhouses and conservatories were damaged. Verdict: At best tenuous.

It was a vampire, sea-monster, poltergeist, a previously unknown bi-ped or the Devil himself. Within the last decade people in Mexico and the US claim to have been visited by the Chupacabra, a 4ft tall rat-like creature which supposedly walks upright and attacks farm animals. Devon is also full of folk legends about (a) the Devil and (b) mischievious ghosts. Verdict: Strictly for believers.

It was a freak of the weather. The ‘Devil’ visited during one of the coldest months on record - colder even than February 1740 (which is a Met Office benchmark). In February 1855 the average temperature across Southern England was minus 1.7 degrees, snow fell every day between January 14th and February 28th and the Thames froze over at Kingston. In Devon, a hot dinner was cooked on the frozen Exe at St Thomas to feed the poor.

The Scottish explorer James Alan Rennie, later claimed that the thaw in south Devon on the night of the mystery could have caused bizarre condensation marks. He claimed to have witnessed a similar event in the South Pole. Verdict: Met Office archivists say they’ve never heard anything like it.

It was a combination of hysteria, gossip and innuendo feeding off a frightened, illiterate public. Verdict: Again, true. But some prints were seen by reliable witnesses at least 20 miles apart.

In her investigation Theo Brown (now deceased) notes that a combination of events (including some of the above) was probably responsible. She says the trail was not continuous, the prints were not all single file and neither were they identical. Crucially, she states that the prints were laid over several days rather than six hours. ‘All the people concerned,’ says Miss Brown, ‘were quite content to leave the thing in the air, rather than spoil a good story.’

However she concludes: ‘To this day, no-one has offered an explanation which takes account of all the available evidence.…even if the single-footed track only covered a part of the distance we still have no idea what creature could possibly have made it.’

One final thought. On January 3rd this year a walker stumbled across a gruesome scene near Sampford Spiney, just 20 miles west of the 1855 ‘visitation’. Six ewes and a ram had been herded together, strangled and laid out in what police believe may have been an occult ceremony.

According to ancient belief, seven is a significant number for satanic rituals. A contract with the devil had to contain seven paragraphs, was binding for seven years and needed seven signatures. Similarly, magical drinks prepared with Satan’s help had to contain seven herbs.

You may not believe that the Devil came to Devon 150 years ago. But on the anniversary next Tuesday evening, when a new moon ensures a black night, there might be some who do.

The Express would like to thank the University of Exeter Library (Special Collections) and the Theo Brown Estate, for access to original documents (ref EUL MS 105/31/4). Also the Met Office library for unearthing 1855 weather records.