37 
fifty or sixty years ago, a collector of stones must have seemed a 
necessarily harmless if somewhat feckless person, incapable of 
anything so manly as smuggling whiskey. This barrel, I am 
informed, never held anything but whiskey at gs. per gallon, the 
duty being ros. 
My friend’s name I do not give, lest some slur should seem to 
attach to it in the eyes of a younger generation of Cumbrians, to 
whom opportunities of amateur smuggling are unknown, except on 
the occasion of a visit to the continent. From some notes which 
he copied from his notebook and sent to me after I had left 
Carlisle, I learned that salt, as well as whiskey, had at one time 
been subject to a much higher excise duty in England than in 
Scotland. In the year 1822 a man named Harding, of Great 
Corby, was shot by an exciseman named Forster, while endeav- 
ouring to smuggle three stones of salt in order to cure his pig; an 
incident which may have had some influence in causing the great 
reduction of the salt duty in 1823. Whiskey, however, remained 
in its old position in spite of a desperate affray which took place 
on Eden Bridge in 1824 between smugglers and excisemen, followed 
a few days after by one hundred and twenty informations against 
publicans for selling smuggled spirits ; a fact which testifies in the 
most unquestionable way to the immense demand in Carlisle for 
whiskey at Scottish prices. Yet more than a quarter of a century 
was to elapse before the equalisation of the excise duty on spirits 
on both sides of the Border, an event which happened in 1852 or 
1853. 
Perhaps in few matters has necessity more often been the 
mother of invention than in smuggling. To turn for a moment to 
south-eastern England. ‘Ina letter to the Hastings Observer dated 
November 15th, 1880, and headed ‘Reminiscences of Old Times,” 
the writer, Mr. E. Wenham,* relates that between 1820 and 1830 
smugglers at Hastings were detected in one case landing kegs of 
spirits hidden in what were apparently blocks of sandstone; 
while in another instance kegs were concealed in lumps of chalk 
On the south-eastern coast, however, smuggling was wholly carried 
*Mr. Wenham lived most of his life at Greenwich, and was well known to me, 
