The vacation spot in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” is Poldhu. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson stay together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, in Cornwall, while taking a restorative holiday.
Their break quickly turns into a murder investigation. Reverend Roundhay asks Holmes to examine the bizarre case of the Tregennis family: one sibling is dead and two have apparently gone insane. When Mortimer Tregennis later dies in a similar way, Holmes identifies a poison released by burning the Devil’s-foot root.
Poldhu is a real location on Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula, near the village of Mullion. Its coastal setting suits Doyle’s story, which combines a remote holiday landscape with dangerous secrets and dramatic weather. The place is sometimes confused with other famous Holmes locations, such as Baskerville Hall or Reichenbach Falls, but neither appears as the vacation setting in this story.
The story was first published in 1910 and later collected in His Last Bow. Poldhu also became associated with Guglielmo Marconi’s early wireless experiments, adding a real-world historical interest to the fictional Holmes setting.