A while ago, regular correspondent and telegraph pole connsoisseur, Jake wrote in.  He had read our post about hieroglyphics and wondered what might the green metallic plate embossed with a letter 'C' indicate?

I know I'd seen one somewhere and it's taken me until now to remember where it was.  There were two adjacent poles with these plates, 9A & 10A, where else, but along the B5105.

Anyway, my relationship with telegraph poles has always been one of aesthetic appreciation and a slightly creepy anorak sort of admiration.  I've never actually worked with them or amongst them. And the only poles I ever climbed were the 100KVA pylons my dad used to send me up every time he got his kite stuck.  And that happened a lot.  Why he always made me wait until it rained to retrieve them I'll never understand.

So I rely on my army of enthusiastic contacts.  And they always come up trumps when it comes to telegraph pole facts.  Here's what the amazing Sean K from Hotmail had to say :

New poles do not need "testing for the first 12 years and thereafter require testing by a "pole tester" every 10 years.

In this case the tester has assessed the pole and found that it is not planted deep enough and so the green "C" means shallow climbable.

For what it's worth, I nearly got run over by a maroon coloured Land Rover Discovery while I was taking this photograph.