| Kinson | ||
| Dorset is well known for its smuggling activities,
being just across the water from Europe and the village of Kinson also
played its part in this notorious criminal activity which has been
romaticised throughout history. But it seems nobody wanted to preserve
anything about this pastime for posterity.
Here though the house of Isaac Gulliver who was said to be a gentle smuggler who never killed anyone, was built especially for escaping from the Revenue and when it was demolished in the 1930s Gulliver moved from the White Hart Inn in Longham to the lodge here in 1780. A secret room had a door set abut ten feet up inside the chimney and there were several tunnels going in every direction and one of these was said to go as far as Parkstone and it Folklore says that the whole of the village has tunnels built by the smugglers. Gulliver had a gang and they had 15 luggers that carried the contraband which consisted mainly of gin, and silk to Poole and they all wore the smocks that the farmhands wore. They had several paths from the beaches of Bournemouth and Poole on which to transport their goods and these were mostly open spaces and they had hidey holes ready to conceal their ungodly gains from the Revenue men. It is said that Gulliver once eluded capture by pretending to be dead and was laid out in an open coffin with his face whitened and even a funeral was arranged and his "body" was changed over by a pile of stone when the coffin was sealed. He became a local hero and he died at the age of 77 and was buried in Wimborne Minster in 1822. Today Kinston is a thriving suburb of Bournemouth with heavily built up areas of housing, light industrial units and shopping precincts. Bournemouth crept into Kinson in 1931 when a new bypass was built that this destroyed a lot of the thatched cottages and Manor house.
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