Searching in graveyards is not perhaps the most exhilarating of pastimes or employments, but it, at any rate, is likely to bring, on occasion, curious local history to light. Not infrequently, in the old churchyards of seaboard parishes, epitaphs bearing upon the story of smuggling may be found. Among these often quaint and curious, as well as tragical, relics, that in Hunstanton churchyard, on the coast of Norfolk, is pre-eminent, both for its grotesquely ungrammatical character and for the history that attaches to the affair: In Memory of William Webb, late of the 15th Lt. D’ns, who was shot from his Horse by a party of Smugglers on the 26 of Sepr. 1784. I am not dead, but sleepeth here, And when the Trumpet Sound I will appear. Four balls thro’ me Pearced there way: Hard it was. I’d no time to pray This stone that here you Do see My Comerades erected for the sake of me. Two smugglers, William Kemble and Andrew Gunton, were arraigned for the murder of this dragoon and an excise officer. The jury, much to the surprise of every one, for the guilt of the prisoners was undoubted, brought in a verdict of “Not guilty”; whereupon Mr. Murphy, counsel for the prosecution, moved for a new trial, observing that if a Norfolk jury were determined not to convict persons guilty of the most obvious crimes, simply because, as smugglers, they commanded the sympathy of the country people, there was an end of all justice. A second jury was forthwith empanelled and the evidence repeated, and after three hours’ deliberation the prisoners were again found “Not guilty,” and were, in accordance with that finding, acquitted and liberated. It is abundantly possible that the foregoing incident had some connection with that locally favourite smugglers’ route from the Norfolk coast inland, the Peddar’s Way, which runs a long and lonely course from Holme, near Hunstanton, right through Norfolk into Suffolk, and is for the greater part of its length a broad, grassy track, romantically lined and overhung with fine trees. Such ancient ways, including the many old drove-roads in the north, never turnpiked, made capital soft going, and, rarely touching villages or hamlets, were of a highly desirable, secretive nature. The origin of the Peddar’s, or Padder’s, Way is still in dispute among antiquaries, some seeing in it a Roman road, others conceiving it to be a prehistoric track; but the broad, straight character of it seems to point to this long route having been Romanised. Its great age is evident on many accounts, not least among them being that the little town of Watton, near but not on it, is named from this prehistoric road, “Way-town,” while that county division, the hundred, is the Hundred of Wayland. CHAPTER IX THE DORSET AND DEVON COASTS—EPITAPHS AT KINSON AND WYKE—THE “WILTSHIRE MOON-RAKERS”—EPITAPH AT BRANSCOMBE—THE WARREN AND “MOUNT PLEASANT” INN