According to a long-standing local legend, soldiers stationed at the very end of the eighteenth century uncovered the entrance to a tunnel said to run from beneath Richmond Castle all the way to Easby Abbey, a distance of over a mile. The passage beyond the entrance itself proved too narrow and rubble-choked for any grown man to actually pass through, so a local drummer boy was sent down instead, told to beat his drum steadily as he went so that the soldiers waiting above could track his progress along the tunnel's own hidden route simply by listening.
The drumming carried on steadily for a while, then gradually faded and finally stopped abruptly, and the boy himself was never seen again by anyone. Whether he fell into some hidden shaft or the tunnel roof simply came down on him was never actually established, since no one was able to follow him through the same narrow passage to find out what had actually happened.
A stone marker in the area is said to mark the exact spot above ground where the drumming was last heard by those listening on the surface, and local tradition holds that faint drumming can still occasionally be made out around the castle grounds even today. The story is a well-known piece of Yorkshire folklore rather than any documented historical case, and it has close cousins in similar drummer-boy-in-a-tunnel legends told at several other English castles, a recognisable folklore type rather than an entirely unique Richmond invention.
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