According to legend, the Devil's Furrow or Devil's Wake () was a clear line in the landscape that was alleged to connect the hermitage of Procopius of Sázava in Sázava with his distant birthplace in in the district of Kolín. The furrow is no longer visible in the terrain and the interpretation of the various relics found in its supposed route is a matter of debate.
Location
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the route of the Devil's Furrow was no longer clear in the terrain. Therefore, there is only indirect information about most of the route, mostly from the works of and . It cannot be ruled out that oral traditions recorded the routes of medieval pilgrimages along the paths of the Devil's Furrow rather than the course of the furrow itself.
commented on the ambiguous course of the furrow in his book Sv. Prokop, jeho klášter a památka u lidu (1895). He wrote that much imagery is needed to find the path of the furrow.
The exception to this information deficit is the section of the furrow between Chotouň and Lipany. The Devil's Furrow is mentioned here in place names (such as on land cadastre maps), which is not found elsewhere along the assumed route. In addition, due to the fact that the Battle of Lipany took place in this area, descriptions of the battlefield are available, which preserve valuable information about the state and progress of the furrow. This section the Devil's Furrow differs in direction from the rest.
According to the maps and description of Miskovský and Kuffner, the furrow started at the eastern edge of Chotouň. It started from the slope below the preserved and led straight to the top of , from where it turns to the south.
In his work from 1903, Jozef Miškovský describes the deeply incised road – the Devil's Furrow – between Chotouň and Lipany as follows: "The road to Lipská near Chotouň is narrowed into a footpath, but before long it continues all the way to Lipany, but with different measures of its depth and matches. From the Chotouň road itself, the path is 4 to 5 m wide and in places about 2.5 m deep, below the Lipany ravine it is 5 to 5.5 m deep and 15 to 16 m wide. From there it is a straight line to the burial mound of Prokop Holý and along the western slope of the Lipský ridge it stretches fairly straight to , above which it crosses the new district road."
Before it was leveled by farmers in the 1950s, the furrow here had the form described by Miškovský. On the northeastern edge of Lipany, where the furrow could not be filled in because a local watercourse runs here, the ravine has remained respectable in size. In their work, for example, J. Bernat and M. Štědra comment on this. This section of the furrow was depicted by Marold in his painting .
From Lipany Mountain, the trail turns south along a dirt road. From there (according to Miškovský and Kuffner) the trail leads along local roads to Dobré Pole, and . Bernat and Štědra offer several parallel routes, for which they find compelling features, especially in the form of detours in wooded sections. From Krymlov, the trail (according to Miškovský) leads along roads and forest paths before disappearing by Moštice. It reappears just south of the village of , from where it turns in an arc to the west and descends the slope along a wide road towards Sázava.
According to legend, the Devil's Furrow ended north of the town of Sázava, in an area called above the meadow. A marked tourist route from the Sázava Monastery also leads here. The tourist entrance to the furrow is marked with an imitation of the "Devil's Plow". From there, a footpath with a modern Stations of the Cross climbs steeply up the slope.
However, precisely in this section, which is currently the only one directly connected to the Devil's Furrow, it is no longer the route recorded by Miškovský and Kuffner. The tourist-marked entrance to the furrow is located approximately 100 meters from the original route. Visitors who set out on the tourist-marked "wake" - a footpath with the Stations of the Cross - are in the wrong place, with no indication of what the wake may have looked like.
Research history
The first written mention of the Devil's Wake is given at the beginning of the seventeenth century by in his collection of church songs.
In 1903, Jozef Miškovský, a former employee of the Podlipanske Museum in Český Brod, and his friend, journalist and military topographer Hanuš Kuffner, noticed that there were no traces of the Devil's Furrow in many places in the landscape, and decided to describe the route according to the accounts of eyewitnesses.