Wistman's Wood's own genuinely extraordinary ecology, a temperate rainforest of dwarf, gnarled oaks unlike anything else in lowland England, gives the Wisht Hounds legend an exceptionally atmospheric and visually striking real setting, the wood's own physical strangeness plausibly sufficient in itself to generate a supernatural reputation independent of any specific historical incident.
The hounds belong to the very widely recorded English tradition of spectral hunting packs, closely related in form and function to the separately recorded Devil's hounds of Dewerstone elsewhere in this Devon register, and Wistman's Wood's association specifically with the alternative leadership of Old Crockern, a distinctly Dartmoor-specific spirit rather than the more generically diabolical figure found in most versions of this tradition, gives the Wisht Hounds an unusually localised mythological identity beyond the more universal Wild Hunt archetype.
The claimed Druidic origin of the wood as a sacred grove reflects the same widespread 18th and 19th-century antiquarian tendency, recorded throughout this wider register, to attribute ancient or unusual natural and prehistoric features to Druidic ritual use, though no archaeological evidence of specifically Druidic activity at Wistman's Wood has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry.
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