So what caused the Devil’s Prints? One hundred and sixty-two years on, we are no more enlightened. One recent theory suggested that they came from an “experimental weather balloon”, released across the county from Devonport Dockyard. Dragging either shackles or an anchor behind it, it would have left in the snow a bizarre impression that accurately matched the given description. What deflates this theory, however, is the logical assumption that at some point the balloon would have got itself tangled (and that there are official records).
The most likely theory—though not necessarily the kindest to the collective intellect of the mid-nineteenth century population of Devon—is that the whole affair was a case of overblown mass hysteria. According to this theory, the tracks were caused by a number of different animals, probably including field mice, donkeys, horses, and ponies. And the failure—amongst all the excitement—of Devon’s community to differentiate between them while they were there led to the creation of a confused local legend after they disappeared.
Regretfully, the lack of photographic evidence from 1855 makes the whole episode impossible to resolve. But all is not lost. As recently as 2009, a resident of the North Devon town of Woolsery woke up to find that overnight her snow-covered back garden had been inexplicably imprinted by hoof prints. What’s more, they ran for some 60 to 70 feet in a single, linear direction, and in shape and size, they were eerily similar to those of just over 150 years before.
The homeowner, Jill Wade, reported her discovery to the Centre for Fortean Zoology, which sent over zoologist Graham Ingils to check them out. Ingils agreed that they matched descriptions from the Great Devon Mystery. He disagreed, however, that they were the prints of the Antichrist who had chosen to stop of at this sleepy, rural village during his annual winter walking holiday. In Ingils’s academic opinion they were probably caused by field mice, though he had to admit: he’d never seen anything like it before.
The story of the “Devil’s Prints” is just one of a series of folk-tales set in Devon. Most famously, though admittedly fictitiously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose Dartmoor, one of vastest national parks in this largely rural county, as the setting of one of his best-known Sherlock Holmes adventures “The Hound of the Baskervilles“. But there are others: many of which, like the Devil’s Prints, will in all likelihood never be solved. But while we’ll never know what caused the footprints that appeared across Devon in 1855, we can say that they have continued to be imprinted on the memory of the county, long after the melting of the winter snow.