North of Devon is North Devon; here (there) coastal regions receive the sea; the slippery viscera of sandy beachheads slivers and slurps in the grip of the South Welsh Sea’s lunar-bound pulse; men and womenfolk walk around, gleeful, full of beans; oh, it’s a nice place. Sink a few hundred micrometres into the interior, though however, and then root about for tales, and it all changes, so it does, doesn’t it?
Many, many, many years ago, during the reign of the sedate has-been-sleepy queen Queen Victoria, one salubrious deep-winter eve came a-tumbling down a snow blanket that rugged the terrain poppywhite – by morn all was stunning crystalline brilliance in the bulbous old sun’s hot-gas grin. Charging into the freshly-laid snowfields to play, local peasants were shocked, chagrined and dismayed to discover something unappetising in the cold sky glitter: ladies and gentlemen – it was the coming of the Devil’s Chin Marks.
For over 3,000 miles, the indent of the Devil’s chin could be discerned in the delicate, powdery precipitation. Tracked and logged by logtrackers, the tortuous trail wound and wove over brooks, huts, barns, ferrets, fords, fences and woodcock. No human chin did this, declared bishops and bushmen alike – tis the Devil’s chin! Quite why the Evil One was traversing the Devonshire countryside by chin was neither explained nor examined, but the explanation satisfied the affected inhabitants, who positively rejoiced in the stench of their own terror.
The police issued a warrant for Lucifer’s arrest – the charge: undermining public morale with an extravagant show of pretentious ghoulishness. Priests and ministers squeaked and squealed from pulpit and dispatch box about how horrendous it all was. Meanwhile, scientifically-bent practitioners lamented that the apparent evidence of Satan’s snow-cast ramblings would dissolve in the sun’s rays. Connor O’ho, chemist and chimney inspector, whined: “If only we had some kind of powerful machine that could record all of our findings via the manipulation of something like silicon. We can but dream.”
Anyways up, the creepy impressions did indeed evaporate in our host star’s gaze, and soon Devon’s populace slipped back into uniform doziness. So, what actually occurred? Modern thinkers have lavished far more prosaic theories on the case, including marauding voles, migrating cats and a feral ballon with a chin-shaped bauble tied to it. In 2016, super-supermarket John Lewis conceitedly implied that Father Christmas himself was the culprit, their slick and saccharine seasonal televisual advert depicting the Lord of Presents hop-pounding the snowy earth with his corpulent chin, while anthropomorphised CGI wild beasts gambolled and leapt in the background, all to a recorded-to-order rendition of The Verve’s The Drugs Don’t Work performed by Stormzy, The XX and, surely ironically, the sometime Conservative MP Nadine Dorries. Britain’s press outlets gushed approvingly of the effort, all agreeing that there had been nothing like it for a least twelve months. And all was well in that little pocket of Christendom the geography books love to call ‘Great England’.
Mysterious EnGland 
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