Why the coast kept its secrets

Long before the railways, moving goods by sea was cheaper than hauling them overland, and the same sheltered coves that made good fishing stations made excellent landing grounds for cargo that never troubled a customs ledger. Smuggling was not a romantic sideline. It was a trade, often a family trade, and the whole of the south and east coast was its warehouse floor.

The geography tells you why. A useful smuggling coast needed three things: a beach where a boat could be run ashore quickly, a channel or slip sheltered from the prevailing swell, and an inland path that could not be watched from the cliff top. Get an Ordnance Survey Explorer map at 1:25,000 and you can still read those requirements off the contours. Look for the steep, tucked-away combe, the lane that climbs inland behind a ridge, the field boundaries that funnel towards a barn rather than a village.

Place names as a paper trail

Names are the cheapest archaeology there is. Where a community was relaxed about the trade, the evidence stayed on the map for two centuries. Keep an eye out for the following as you walk or paddle:

• Coves, caves and points carrying Brandy, Keg, Tub or Smugglers in the name
• Inland lanes called Smugglers' Path, Contraband Lane or simply The Hollow Way
• Custom, King's and Watch names on quays, cottages and old lookout points
• Free Trade or Owler in pub and field names, both old slang for the business

Prussia Cove in Cornwall takes its name from the Carter family, who ran a formidable operation there and were nicknamed the Kings of Prussia. On Romney Marsh, the wool smugglers were called Owlers, supposedly because they moved by night like owls. Neither name is decorative; both are documentary.

The inns that kept watch

The alehouse was part of the machinery, not a bystander. Look for a pub set slightly back from the road with a wide archway for carts, a cellar that does not quite match the building above it, or a first-floor window with a clear sightline down the valley to the sea. Some have stone-lined passages to a beach that are now blocked, or a smugglers' hole behind a fireplace.

The best approach is also the most enjoyable. Buy a pint, sit near the bar, and ask what the building used to be. Landlords and regulars on this coast are usually delighted to be asked, and the stories they tell tend to be geographically accurate even when the details have grown. Look out for names like The Ship, The King's Head, The Smugglers' Rest and The Old Custom House — and note how many sit a mile or more inland, where a loaded pony train could be hidden from the revenue men.

Legends that still walk the path

Folk memory dramatises people but remembers ground remarkably well. Tales of lanterns on clifftops, of false lights and wrecking, usually point to a real channel or reef nearby. Ghost stories about a riding officer, a customs man posted to a lonely stretch, often attach themselves to a specific gate, stile or bridge — and those are exactly the pinch points where a route had to be watched.

Take local legends as directions rather than history. A tale of a cargo run ashore at a particular cove will usually lead you to a genuinely good landing beach, a genuinely steep exit path, and quite often a genuinely old trackway running inland to a farm that was conspicuously wealthy for its size.

Sea angling on the old marks

Here is the happy accident for anyone who fishes: the smuggling marks are good angling marks, and for the same reasons. Deep water close inshore, a patch of sand or shingle between rock, a channel a boat can slip out through — all of it attracts fish as readily as it once attracted contraband.

Fish the two hours either side of high water for the best of it. Summer brings bass to lures and plugs over shallow rough ground, mackerel to feathers off the headlands, and pollack and wrasse to baited ledger gear where the rock drops away. Estuaries behind the old landing coves fish well for flounder and school bass on a flooding tide. Take a headlamp, a tide table and light gear; a rising tide on a narrow cobbled slip fills faster than you expect. Check current minimum sizes and any bass restrictions before you keep anything, and leave the mark as tidy as you found it.

Walking the route for yourself

Pick a stretch of coast rather than a whole county. Sections of the South West Coast Path, the Pembrokeshire Coast Path and the Norfolk Coast Path all run straight through old smuggling country, and a five-mile day is plenty. Wear boots with grip, carry water, tell someone your route, and take the map folded to the cove you care about.

Stand on the headland, work out where you would put a path if you wanted to move a keg inland without being seen, then walk that line. It will usually take you past a blocked doorway, an overgrown slip, or a pub that has been quietly serving the same corner of the coast for four hundred years. That is the real pleasure of this kind of day out: you are not visiting history, you are following it.