Dewerstone's own genuine identity as an Iron Age hillfort gives this legend a real prehistoric monument as its physical setting, its name's direct derivation from an ancient Celtic word for the Devil, rather than a later folk attribution, giving this tradition an unusually deep and linguistically traceable root compared with most of this register's diabolically named landscape features.
The phantom pack of black hounds situates this legend within the wider Wild Hunt tradition found across British and European folklore, in which a supernatural huntsman, sometimes the Devil, sometimes a more ambiguous fae or pagan figure, leads a spectral chase across the landscape at night, closely paralleling the separately recorded Wisht Hounds of Wistman's Wood elsewhere on Dartmoor within this same register.
Dewerstone's own genuinely dangerous cliff-edge topography, still today a popular and challenging site for rock climbers, gives this legend a real and continuing physical hazard as its narrative core, travellers driven over the edge to their deaths a folkloric explanation entirely consistent with the site's actual capacity to cause a fatal fall, whatever supernatural framing local tradition has chosen to attach to that danger.
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