The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft

and Wyke-The "Wiltshire Moon-Rakers"-Epitaph at

hose parts than because less careful record has been kept of them. An early epitaph on a smuggler, to be seen in the churchyard of Kinson, just within the Dorset bound

Robert Trotman,

lts, who was bar

ar Poole, the 2

one leaf I d

bloodshed I

scale, human

'tis to slay a

that used the church here as a hiding-place. The upper stage of the tower and an

s," i.e. frogs; or stupidity, e.g. "Silly Suffolk"; or humbug-for example, "Devonshire Crawlers." "Wiltshire Moonrakers" is generally considered to be a term of contempt for Wilts rustic stupidity; but, rightly considered, it is nothing of the kind. It all depends how you take the story which gave rise to it. The usual version tells us how a party of travellers, crossing a bridge in Wiltshire by night when the harvest moon wa

th safety be removed. The travellers, properly considered, were really revenue officers, scouring the neighbourhood. This version of the story fairly throws the accusation of innocence and dunderheadedness back upon them, and clears the Wiltshire rural character from contempt. It should

or seventy, curiously enough, found them instead, and immediately taking away their swords and pistols, carried them to the edge of the cliff and placed them with their heads hanging over the precipice; with the comfortable assurance that if they made the least noise, or gave alarm, they should be immediately thrown over. In the interval a smuggl

to have been the original whence Mr. Thomas Hardy obtained

r took place under St. Aldhelm's Head, in 1827, between an armed band of some seventy or eighty smugglers and the local preventive men, who numbered only ten, but gave a good account of themselves, two smugglers being repo

which they can knock people's brains out"; and proceeds to say that weapons of this kind,

; and, information being laid, Captain Jackson, the local inspector of customs, went with an ass

ere?" ask

ant a drop of brandy for mother," retu

in the grasp of the police-officer. Henry Fooks, of Knowle, and three others o

s told on another page, could doubtless have rubricated this shore of many cliffs and remote hamlets with striking instances; and not a cliff-top but must have frequently exhibited lights to "flash the lugger off," what time the preve

and forgotten incidents is found in the epitap

to th

IAM

killed b

e Pigmy

1822, age

reft (by f

with my f

protectio

on the Ju

ch blood-stain

l, ere it

eadful doom

l sure aven

is Erected

mark of re

onate H

entation, carved in low relief, of the Pi

cks of Sandsfoot Castle, where the ragged, roofless walls of that old seaward fortress impend over the waves, and the great bulk of Portland isle glooms

lk inland from the modern developments of that now rapidly growing town to the old church, you may see there a tablet recording the sad fate of William Henry Paulson,

n to one "Mr. John Harley, Custom House Officer of this parish." It proceeds to narrate how, "as he was endeavouring to extinguish some Fire made between Beer and Seaton as a signal to a Smuggling Boat then off at sea, he fell by some means or other from the

tyr to the conditions c

of the Great Western Railway having provided, midway between the stations of Starcross and Dawlish, a little platform called the "Warren Halt." But in those times before railways, when the Warren was not easily come at, the smugglers found it a highly convenient place for their business. Beside it, under the lee of Langston Point, there is a sheltered strand, and, at such times when it was considered quite safe, the sturdy free-traders quietly ran their boats ashore here, on the yellow sands, and conveyed their contents to the "Mount Pleasant" inn, which is an unassuming-and was in those times a still more unassuming-house, perched picturesquely on the crest of a red sandstone bluff which rises inland, sheer from the marshy meadows. It was a very convenient receiving-house and signal-sta

or the smugglers' caves at Mount Pl

at such times any spirit-tubs that might have been sunk out at sea and carefully buoyed by the smugglers, awaiting a favourable time for landing, were apt to break loose and drift in-shore. There was always, at such times, a sporting chance of a good haul. But, on the other hand, some of the many tubs that had been sunk months before, and lost, would on these occasions come to hand, and they were worth just