On the morning of 9 February 1855, the people of Devon, in southwest England, woke up to find the snow covered in footprints. Not human footprints. Hoof prints.
They were about four inches long, cloven, and they ran in a single line, one after another, roughly eight to sixteen inches apart, as if something had walked without ever breaking stride. The line crossed fields and lanes and gardens. It also, according to the accounts, went over walls and rooftops, crossed the river Exe, and continued on the other side. Some versions have the line running from Exmouth to Topsham and on toward Dawlish, a distance people described as between forty and a hundred miles. All of it, apparently, in one night.
The prints were reported in dozens of places by people who had no way to compare notes before morning. There were reports of them on the doorstep of a house, and then on the snow-covered roof above it, and then on the ground beyond. Churchyards got them too, which did nothing for anyone''s nerves. A local legend grew up on top of the story, that the devil had come walking through Devon looking for sinners, and that he had found them.
The timing and the setting did most of the work. This was a rural county in the middle of a cold winter, in an age before electric light, in a culture where omens were ordinary conversational currency. People did not read the prints as a puzzle to be solved. They read them as a sign, and signs had meanings. Sermons were preached about it. Letters were written to newspapers. The story traveled out of Devon within days and has never really stopped traveling since.
What actually made those marks? There has never been a settled answer, but the plausible explanations are interesting.
One is that the prints were made by an animal moving in a bounding gait — a rabbit, a badger, or a deer. When an animal bounds, its hind feet land where its front feet just were, which can leave a single, oddly shaped track that looks like one foot rather than four. Then the snow did the rest. Snow does not hold an impression the way wet mud does. It melts, it refreezes, it collapses around the edges, and a small neat print becomes a larger, stranger, hoof-shaped hole by morning. This is, in the view of most people who have looked into it, the strongest explanation for the line itself.
Another possibility is a hoax by pranksters, though that raises a difficulty: producing a convincing line of unusual prints across that much ground, over walls and rooftops, is a lot of work for a joke with no audience.
There is also a simpler reading that gets overlooked. Some of the reported prints were probably not connected at all. Snow, darkness, and a story already spreading will do a great deal to turn separate marks in separate villages into one continuous line by the time the tale reaches the next town. Memory is generous that way.
There is also a creature nobody wants to rule out, simply because there is no good candidate. The whole event has one more thing going for it, which is timing. It happened in a cold February, in a rural county, in a country where ghost stories and omens were everyday conversation. A strange mark in the snow in 1855 was not just a puzzle. It was a message, and people knew how to read messages.
The footprints were gone by the next thaw. What survived was the story, and the story has now outlived every single person who saw the snow that morning. That is the part worth sitting with. Whatever walked across Devon left nothing but a line of marks, and a hundred and seventy years later we are still repeating it.
In 3026, when someone reads this, the prints will be long gone, the snow long gone, Devon changed past recognition. What will still exist is the sentence. Which is, if you think about it, the only kind of footprint any of us actually gets to leave.
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