Country diary: These tunnels could make smugglers out of anyone

Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire: If you don’t mind a bit of dankness, the warren of passages and interconnected houses here is ripe for adventure

Midwinter dusk is falling as we navigate the steep maze of arms’-width alleys that pass for streets in Robin Hood’s Bay. It’s the stuff of Instagram dreams, but if you were to go back 250 years, locals had another use for the warren on their doorsteps. Back then, this tiny community was among the busiest smuggling hotspots on the North Sea coast of England. Contraband rowed ashore under the gaze of a clifftop lookout disappeared into a network of passages, interconnected houses and tunnels, including one opening directly on to the slipway. I must have been here a dozen times before my friend Jen told me that it led somewhere, and today we spring the same surprise on our children.

They are initially wary. The dark, the rushing water and the smell – not foul, but dank – are not exactly inviting. It’s a bit much for the littlest, but the older two are game, first edging along a shelf on one side, then hopping rock to rock, nimble as ship rats. A short way in, a smaller tunnel opens to one side. It is steeper and rockier than the main culvert, with a beamed and boarded roof that suggests we are under a building. It would be the work of seconds to pass a packet through a lifted board, from where it could be whisked, hand to hand, house to house, to a safe hiding place.

That’s how it happened. It was risky, but the profit on a single parcel of tea or silk or a bladder of Dutch gin exceeded a week’s legally earned wage, and with geology, topography and hydrology on their side, the entire community, as tight-knit as a fisherman’s gansey, was in on it. Rather than being a place built for smuggling, smugglers were made by this place.

The tunnel leads out into a steep gully, its sides green with mosses, woodrush and ferns. Above, Christmas lights twinkle in the fog-furled night – close, but somehow a world distant.

In the bar of the Bay Hotel later, the kids form a conspiratorial huddle. By the time we leave, the littlest has found her courage, and back to the tunnel they go, together this time, to emerge triumphant, with rebellion running hot in their veins.

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