Devonshire Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

The coasts of Devon and Cornwall, north and south, are bold, with cliffs starting out of the sea, white near the Dorset frontier, then red, and then of limestone marble, or, on the north coast, of slate and schist. The rocks are riddled with caves, the highland is cleft by narrow valleys sawn through their mass by descending streams. The whole coast, north and south, lends itself to smuggling; and smuggling had been carried on as a profitable speculation till it ceased to pay, when heavy duties were removed, and when the coastguard became efficient.

The smugglers formerly ran their goods into the caves when the weather permitted, or the preventive men, nicknamed picaroons, were not on the look-out. They stowed away their goods in the caves, and gave notice to the farmers and gentry of the neighbourhood, all of whom were provided with numerous donkeys, which were forthwith sent down to the caches, and the kegs and bales were removed under cover of night or of storm. Few farmhouses and squires’ mansions were not also provided with hiding-places in which to store the kegs obtained from the free-traders. Only the week before writing this I was shown one such in the depth of a dense wood, at Sandridge Park on the Dart; externally it would have been taken for a natural mound or a tumulus. But there are a concealed door and a descent by a flight of steps into the subterranean cellar, that was carefully vaulted, and also carefully drained.

The other day I saw an old farmhouse in process of demolition in the parish of Altarnun, on the edge of the Bodmin Moors. The great hall chimney was of unusual bulk, bulky as such chimneys usually are; and when it was thrown down it revealed the explanation of this unwonted size. Behind the back of the hearth was a chamber fashioned in the thickness of the wall to which access might have been had at some time through a low walled-up doorway, that was concealed behind the kitchen dresser and plastered over. This door was so low that it could be passed through only on all fours.

Now the concealed chamber had also another way by which it could be entered, and this was through a hole in the floor of a bedroom above. A plank of the floor could be lifted, when an opening was disclosed by which any one might pass under the wall through a sort of door and down steps into this apartment, which was entirely without light. Of what use was this singular concealed chamber? There could be little question. It was a place in which formerly kegs of smuggled spirits and tobacco were hidden. The place lies some fourteen or fifteen miles from Boscastle, a dangerous little harbour on the North Cornish coast, and about a mile off the main road from London, by Exeter and Launceston, to Falmouth. The coach-travellers in old days consumed a good deal of spirits, and here in a tangle of lanes lay a little emporium always kept well supplied with a stock of spirits which had not paid duty, and whence the taverners along the road could derive the contraband liquor, with which they supplied the travellers. Between this emporium and the sea, the roads—parish roads—lie over wild moors or creep between high hedges of earth on which the traveller can step along when the lane below is converted into the bed of a stream, also on which the wary smuggler could stride, and keep a look-out whilst his laden mules and asses stumbled forward in the concealment of the deep-set lane.

JOHN RATTENBURY.
of Beer, Devonshire
“THE ROB ROY of the WEST”

A very noticeable feature of the Devon and Cornwall coasts is the trenched and banked-up paths from the little coves. By these paths the kegs and bales were removed under cover of night.

As an excuse for keeping droves of donkeys, it was pretended that the sea-sand and the kelp served as admirable dressing for the land; and no doubt so they did; the trains of asses sometimes came up laden with sacks of sand, but not infrequently with kegs of brandy.

Now a wary preventive man might watch too narrowly the proceedings of these trains of asses. Accordingly squires, yeomen, farmers alike set to work to cut deep ways in the face of the downs, along the slopes of the hills, and bank them up, so that whole caravans of laden beasts might travel up and down absolutely unseen from the sea and greatly screened from the land side.