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 whilst his laden mules and asses stumbled
forward in the concealment of the deep-set lane.
A very curious feature of the coasts of the West of England, where rocky or wild, is the trenched and banked-up paths from the coves along the coast. These are noticeable in Devon and Cornwall and along the Bristol Channel. That terrible sea-front consists of precipitous walls of rock, with only here and there a dip, where a brawling stream has sawn its course down to the sea ; and here there is, perhaps, a sandy shore of diminutive proportions, and the rocks around are pierced in all directions with caverns. The smugglers formerly ran their goods into these coves when the weather permitted, or the
