When I was at school, I was shown a tunnel under a pub.
At least, that is what I have spent most of my life calling it.
The pub was the Treguth Inn at Holywell Bay, in the village behind the beach, south-west of Newquay. I knew the child of the owners at the time and remember being shown a hidden, partly blocked passage. I also remember being told it was a smugglers' tunnel.
That is an excellent thing to tell a child. You have taken a building where adults sit around talking and suddenly given it a secret criminal basement.
I was hardly going to interrupt and ask whether a drainage engineer had considered another explanation.
The memory stayed with me. Eventually, I went looking for the history behind it.
I began with the records. Crawling into an unidentified hole under a pub seemed a less promising opening move, particularly for anybody who might subsequently have to get me out.
A farmhouse before it was a pub
The surviving Treguth building is old enough to provide a good story without borrowing anybody else's centuries.
Historic England dates it mainly to the early seventeenth century, with a later seventeenth-century addition. It was a farmhouse before it became an inn.
That immediately changes the picture. Before we put barrels of illicit brandy into the scene, there is a working household to think about: rooms arranged around the needs of people living and working on a farm.
The listing describes a three-room-and-passage plan. In that architectural sense, a passage is a way through the building. It does not mean an underground escape route.
My childhood recollection is of being shown a hidden or partly blocked feature. Its purpose is still unproved. The passage I remember and the smuggling explanation I was given are two different things.
That is the essential distinction. It leaves us with a real memory and an interesting question, without furnishing the cellar with an entirely invented gang.
The problem with a sufficiently old hole
Cornwall offers an impressive range of underground spaces: mine workings, drainage adits, cellars, natural caves, railway tunnels and access passages cut through awkward ground.
An adit, incidentally, is a roughly horizontal passage into a mine. It can provide access or drainage. The word is less glamorous than “smugglers' tunnel”, but the people who made and used one had rather more immediate concerns than its appeal to future visitors.
Water needed to get out. Material needed to move. People needed a workable route.
Add a couple of centuries of stories and almost any old opening can acquire a pirate. The pirate normally arrives much later than the opening.
Newquay Harbour gives us a useful way to untangle this. The mineral railway used an incline and tunnel to get goods down to harbour level. Separately, the South Pier had an arched passage providing a beach-level connection between the harbour and Towan Beach.
Both belong to the working geography of the place. They solved problems.
If you have ever carried something heavy down an inconvenient flight of steps, you already understand why a harbour town might spend money improving the journey. Multiply the load, repeat it through a working day, and the route becomes an important part of the business.
The railway story has horses, machinery and cargo handling of its own. It does not need an additional smuggler wedged into the account.
Newquay was arguing about this in 1888
One of the best finds is a published transcription of a letter dated 13 September 1888.
Its writer was responding to somebody who had denied that Newquay had smuggling caves. The reply referred to an old, already blocked underground passage leading from the Fistral side towards the Red Lion Hotel, near the harbour.
It also distinguished a supposed smuggling hole from another opening the writer thought miners had probably excavated.
So the argument was already happening in Victorian Newquay: which hole, made by whom, and used for what?
The correspondent signed off “ONE WHO KNOWS”. It is a wonderfully confident signature for a debate which has outlived everybody involved.
The account matters because it records an old passage story at that date. Its precise route and purpose are not established by the letter. But we can stop treating the whole subject as something invented last week to improve a pub's atmosphere.
The people who lived here were already looking at their coast and disagreeing about its past.
That, at least, feels thoroughly modern.
A smuggler with something to tell us
For a sense of the people behind the trade, we can move to a man who left his own account: Harry Carter, a smuggling captain associated with Prussia Cove on Cornwall's south coast, near Marazion.
This is a different place from Holywell and Newquay. Carter's autobiography lets us look at the wider business without pretending he operated through the passage under the Treguth.
His world involved vessels, crews, overseas contacts, credit and money to collect. It could be a substantial commercial undertaking. The picturesque cove was one part of a much larger operation.
And the danger was real.
Carter described an encounter at Cawsand, near Plymouth, in January 1788. Expecting boats to help unload his cargo, he instead found himself boarded by naval men. He was struck repeatedly about the head and left for dead.
He eventually escaped over the side, struggled in the water and reached the shore, where help got him to shelter. In his account, one man took off his own shirt to replace Carter's wet clothing.
That small act stays with me as much as the violence. There is a badly injured person, cold and exhausted, and somebody doing the immediately useful thing.
This is a long way from the decorative smuggler who appears on a sign holding a cheerful little barrel.
Carter later described hiding and trying to avoid visible smoke during the day. Concealment could be an exhausting business of watching, waiting and relying on other people. A secret passage would not remove the need for friends, food, warmth or somewhere to recover.
His autobiography is also a religious account, written by a man looking back on his conduct. The guilt and fear belong to the story alongside the daring.
He gives us a person, with beliefs and weaknesses, rather than a costume.
The people mattered as much as the hiding places
Picture the practical work of landing a cargo. The boat is only the beginning.
Goods have to reach the shore, be lifted and carried, find somewhere to wait, and reach a buyer. Somebody has to know when to turn up. Somebody has to trust somebody else with money or information.
This is an illustrative reconstruction of the work involved, not a claim that we have recovered the arrangements of a particular Holywell landing.
It is nevertheless a better way into the subject than starting with an enormous tunnel network. A business depended on people doing their part, sometimes in darkness and bad weather, with consequences if it went wrong.
We are used to deliveries appearing at the door while the effort behind them remains largely invisible. Here, imagining the carrying makes the story physical again.
A barrel becomes less romantic when you are the person responsible for getting it uphill.
The story under the story
Other Cornish pubs preserve their own versions of the underground past.
At the Old Albion in Crantock, the pub's account describes a blocked passage as a smugglers' hole. At the Golden Lion in Port Isaac, farther along the north coast, published descriptions connect a passage with the downstairs Bloody Bones bar and the beach. The conservation-area appraisal describes the basement as probably a store and treats its contraband association as local legend.
Those descriptions are worth keeping in their proper form. A building, a physical feature and a story about its use can all survive together without answering precisely the same question.
For me, the Treguth remains the beginning.
I can still recognise the appeal of what I was told as a child. An ordinary-looking place suddenly had another world behind it. People might have moved through spaces you could not see, doing things they did not want everybody to know about.
The research has made that world more populated. Farmers, miners, railway workers, people handling cargo, a Victorian correspondent certain he knew the answer, and a badly wounded captain being given a dry shirt.
There is much more life here than the single word “smugglers” can hold.
I would still like to identify the passage I remember. That would mean returning with permission and looking properly at the surviving feature and any plans or records.
For now, the childhood story has done something useful. It has led out from one blocked opening into the working lives of the coast.
I went looking for a tunnel. I found a great many people.
Sources
Historic England: Treguth Inn — Building date and farmhouse plan.
Cornwall and Scilly Urban Survey: Newquay (2003) — Harbour railway and separate South Pier access passage.
1888 letter: modern transcription — Historical passage account; original newspaper not yet inspected.
Harry Carter: The Autobiography of a Cornish Smuggler — Carter’s own account of Cawsand and concealment; separate from the editor’s later introduction.
Old Albion: pub history — The pub’s account of its passage.
Port Isaac Conservation Area Appraisal (2008) — Store interpretation and smuggling legend.
CAMRA: Golden Lion — Published description of the passage.