Secret Passages & Smoky Whispers: Scarborough’s Hidden Tunnels

 

Scarborough’s a town built on layers. You can feel it under your feet — that sense there’s more going on beneath the cobbles than most people notice. It’s in the wind, in the stone, and, if you know where to look, in the cracks and crevices tucked into every alley off Eastborough.

Bertie and I were out early this morning, and as he barrelled down the path behind the harbour like a dog late for his shift on the lifeboat, I stopped to tie my boot and spotted it again — the bricked-up archway halfway up the old smugglers’ steps. You can barely see it now, covered in ivy and time, but it’s there. And if you listen carefully, it almost hums with the weight of untold stories.

Tobacco in the Walls

We know this much: in the 18th and 19th centuries, Scarborough was a hotbed for smugglers. Tobacco, brandy, silk — all slipped ashore by lantern light, then hidden in cellars, behind false walls, or down narrow stone tunnels that burrowed beneath pubs, fishmongers, and chapel basements.

And tucked into coat pockets or small tin canisters? Snuff. Portable, potent, and easy to trade without a plume of smoke giving you away. I imagine one of those old sea dogs standing in a tunnel beneath Longwestgate, a lantern swinging on a hook, taking a pinch of something like Pöschl’s Gawith Apricot Snuff — fruity, warm, and gently spiced. A moment of brightness in a damp, dark corridor.

Or maybe it was the cooling bite of Pöschl’s Gletscherprise Snuff that kept the salt air out of their noses — a fresh burst of menthol and eucalyptus strong enough to part fog on the harbour.

The Grand’s Lost Arteries

There’s an old rumour that a tunnel once ran beneath The Grand Hotel — from the kitchens out to the seafront. Whether it was used for deliveries, servants, or secret wartime movement, no one knows for sure. But I’ve spoken to a builder who claims he saw its mouth before it was sealed — curved stone, still damp, leading down and away like a forgotten artery of the town.

You can almost picture it — a hotel porter sneaking a break between ballroom dances, pulling a tin of Wilsons of Sharrow Irish No. 22 from his coat. Earthy and smoky, it’s a no-nonsense snuff with Yorkshire backbone. Fitting, really, since Wilsons is a local institution in its own right — still producing snuff just over the moors in Sheffield.

Scarborough Stories in Every Pinch

I keep a tin of Wilsons SM 500 in my coat for mornings like today. Medicated, minty, with a sort of bracing clarity that cuts through even a North Sea headwind. A pinch of it on Marine Drive can wake the dead — or at least wake me before the second coffee.

We might not need tunnels anymore, but some rituals survive. You still see older gents outside the betting shop taking a discreet pinch. And a few of us — the stubborn and the sentimental — still keep snuff as part of the day’s rhythm. A gesture. A pause.

So next time you’re walking the South Bay and the wind picks up and you catch that whiff of brine, old stone, and the distant echo of footsteps underground — take a moment. Pull out your tin. Give a nod to the past. The tunnels are still there, somewhere. And the stories? They haven’t gone anywhere.

🖋️ — The Backy Chronicler

Location: 12 Bar St, Scarborough YO11 2HT, UK

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