Eight Pubs on One Street

Hilltown is a one-street village perched in the foothills of the Mourne Mountains. It’s quiet now — a post office, a church, a scattering of houses climbing a gentle hill. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, this tiny settlement was the busiest black-market hub in County Down. At its peak, eight pubs lined a single main street. Not because the locals were unusually thirsty. Because Hilltown was where the contraband arrived.

The goods came over the mountains from the coast. French brandy, tobacco, silks, tea — anything that carried an excise duty — was landed at Bloody Bridge on the shore south of Newcastle. From there, packhorses carried it up through the High Mournes, over Bealach Mór (Hare’s Gap — ‘the great pass’), down through the Trassey valley, and into Hilltown. The journey took a single night if you knew the path. And the smugglers knew it very well.

The pubs weren’t just drinking establishments. They were warehouses, banks, and negotiating rooms rolled into one. A publican might buy a barrel of French brandy in the back room at midnight and sell it by the measure across the bar the next evening. Everyone in the village knew. Nobody was telling. The excise men had to travel from Newry, and by the time they arrived, the goods had already moved on — split between cellars, barns, and the back rooms of those eight pubs.

Hilltown was perfectly placed. Remote enough to be awkward for the authorities, close enough to the mountains to receive goods quickly, and well-connected enough by road to distribute them onward to Newry, Rathfriland, and beyond. It was a logistics operation dressed up as a village. The main street was essentially a supply chain with front doors.

What makes Hilltown’s story remarkable isn’t the illegality — smuggling was common across Ireland. It’s that the village never bothered to hide it. The smuggling was woven into everyday life, into the music, the storytelling, and the social fabric. The pubs were where deals were done, but they were also where the craic happened. Fiddle sessions, songs, tall tales — the whole culture of a community that lived between the law and the mountains.

This wasn’t a criminal underworld. It was an open conspiracy. The entire community benefited, from the publicans to the farmers who lent their ponies, to the women who packed goods into false-bottomed carts. The excise duty was seen as an English imposition, and dodging it was a point of local pride. Buying smuggled brandy wasn’t a shameful secret — it was practically a civic duty.

The smuggling trade faded through the 19th century as excise enforcement tightened and the economics shifted. Eight pubs became fewer. But Hilltown didn’t disappear — it just got quieter. Several of the original pub buildings still stand along the main street, some repurposed, some still trading. The village keeps its shape: a single street climbing a gentle hill, the mountains rising behind it, the same road the packhorses walked.

Walk the main street today and you’re walking the end of a smuggling route that stretched from the coast, over Northern Ireland’s highest peaks, and down into this improbable little hub of commerce and craic. The contraband is gone. The buildings remember.