In the south of England in the winter of 1962/63, a very strange thing happened. It was a very cold winter, the coldest for over 100 years and on the 31st of December, in the early morning, it started to snow, big white thick snowflakes. The snow was so heavy you could not see a metre in front of you. It snowed all that day and all of the night, which was New Years Eve, and then on the morning of January 1st it stopped but the temperature stayed well below freezing.

 In the south of England there was more than one metre of snow, all the roads and railways were closed and there was no electricity or telephones as the weight of the snow had broken the cables. For all the people there was no contact with the outside world. The freezing temperatures would continue below freezing for 3 months.

After 3 days, the electricity came back on and Police stations across the south of England started receiving hundreds of calls from frightened people. The story was always the same, on the night of the 1st of January, people heard the sound of what they though was a horse galloping across the roofs of their houses. When the next morning they went outside to look, they saw cloven hoof prints across gardens, over cars and up onto roofs, not from a horse because there were definitely only two footprints, so it was something with only two legs. As the day went on and more and more calls came in, the Police started marking the sightings on a map. 

They could see a pattern emerging. The Police then started contacting other Police stations along the line and it became obvious that something had traveled at great speed for over 200 miles. The line showed that the beast had begun its journey at The Devil´s Punch bowl in Surrey, just south of London and ended its journey at a river crossing on Dartmoor in Devon, called The Devil´s stepping stones.