Walk With Horton: Sweare Deep — A Smugglers' Hideaway

Picturesque. Peaceful. Almost deserted.

A handful of wading birds. A dog in the distance. Yachts gently swaying on the incoming tide.

This is Sweare Deep, at the top of the Emsworth Channel in Chichester Harbour, between Hayling Island to the west and Emsworth to the east, on England's south coast.

It's a beautiful, quiet corner of the harbour. But, like many places around this coastline, it has a past that is rather less peaceful.

A coastline shaped by the tide

Chichester Harbour is a landscape of creeks, channels, mudflats and sheltered inlets. The tide constantly changes the view, exposing stretches of shoreline and then covering them again.

That intricate geography has always shaped how people move around the harbour. And in the days when smuggling flourished along the south coast, secluded waterways and quiet landing places could offer opportunities to bring goods ashore away from more closely watched ports.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw widespread smuggling around parts of the south coast. Tea, spirits, tobacco and other goods could be landed covertly and transported inland, avoiding customs duties.

The landscape around Sweare Deep invites you to imagine how it might have been done.

Nearby Pook Lane runs through the meadows at Warblington towards the water's edge. It is easy to see how routes connecting the shore with the land could have been useful to anyone wanting to move goods discreetly. Details of particular local smuggling stories should, of course, be treated with care, but the wider coastline has a long association with this clandestine trade.

Imagine the activity that might once have taken place under cover of darkness.

From real location to crime fiction

For a crime writer, a place like this immediately raises questions.

Who might have come ashore here? What might they have been carrying? Who might have been waiting for them? And what could happen if someone arrived at the wrong time?

Those questions found their way into my DI Andy Horton Solent Murder Mysteries.

In The Portsmouth Murders, an investigation involving the Port of Portsmouth and a smuggling case brings DI Andy Horton unexpectedly to Sweare Deep.

Horton isn't here to catch smugglers in the act. Instead, he finds himself in a far more immediate danger.

On a steamy August night, a violent thunderstorm breaks over the harbour. At this quiet spot, Horton has to fight for his life against two hardened adversaries.

It's a rather different scene from the one I see when I visit.

The real Sweare Deep is peaceful. The fictional Sweare Deep becomes a place of danger, tension and a struggle for survival.

That contrast is part of the pleasure of writing crime fiction. A location doesn't have to look threatening to become the setting for something terrible. 

Listening to the landscape

When I stand at Sweare Deep, I can hear the wind, the water and the calls of the gulls. I can watch the boats moving gently on their moorings and see the tide changing the shape of the shoreline.

And, if I let my imagination take over, I can picture small boats slipping towards the shore under cover of darkness.

It's not that the landscape tells you exactly what happened. Rather, it gives you the beginnings of a story.

A sound. A shadow. A secluded place. A question that won't go away.

For me, that's often where a mystery begins.

Walk With Horton

My  Walk With Horton series explores the real coastal locations, landscapes and history behind my DI Andy Horton Solent Murder Mysteries.

Some places are linked to a particular discovery. Others become part of the geography of Horton's life. And some, like Sweare Deep, offer a striking contrast between their peaceful appearance and the dangers I imagine for my fictional detective.

You can visit Sweare Deep today and see the same tidal waters, birds and boats.

But in The Portsmouth Murders, this quiet corner of Chichester Harbour becomes the setting for a night Horton won't forget.

Because when you're writing crime fiction, you never quite see a peaceful place in the same way again.