Is in Scotland. At least as far as telegraph pole aficionado-dom goes. Keen railway traveller and line-side paraphernalia enthusiast William Brown captured this gorgeous five-armer from a moving train just north of Insch on the Inverness to Aberdeen line.
I have spent an unhealthy amount of time scrutinising google maps and street view to parachute in wherever the road crosses this line to find that it is a rich seam of such calendar-worthy poles.
I’ve already booked my holidays for this year – yes, just one per year. Mustn’t be greedy – and the concept of Aberdeenshire came a little late in the holiday bid/selection process. Now actively looking for an excuse to get up there – some 568 miles or 10 hrs 44 mins door-to-door or should I say door to pole. Thanks William, do keep ’em coming.
NOTE to pole photographers out there – actively looking for landscape mode pics of fine poles with interesting backgrounds. High resolution as possible (modern phones are ok). There’s a freebie calendar in it for you if we use your pic. It’s getting ever harder to fill a calendar – see previous post about the Fabled Lost Pole 🙁
What is it about telegraph poles and Scotland? Many of the finest extant poles can be found north of the border. And some of our most ardent telegraph pole appreciators are also from up there. Recent member William Brown sent in the photo below of a pole graveyard at Keith railway station yard. The picture, I must add, was taken by fellow new member, Mike Cooper. Official secrets and all that precludes me from telling you their membership numbers. But they are adjacent.
Apart from Keith being the name of my dad, it is a town that sounds like it should be in Aberdeenshire but is actually in Moray and is the geographical location where the A95 meets the A96. It’s also got a football team, a St. Rufus church and a Tooty’s Takeaway. And this pole graveyard of course. I’ve google street-viewed myself hoarse but haven’t been able to spot them. Seeing these expired five armers in rigor mortis I find deeply disturbing. I shouldn’t be looking at this picture so close to bedtime. And I’ve just had cheese.
Every cloud, as they say. Now that I’ve given the location away I can imagine busloads of insulator collectors turning up at some station somewhere asking to be taken to Keith and the conductor saying “He’s not working today.”
While I’m on, just 20 calendars left now. I’m supposed to be moving house so they have to go. Pic below of June by way of temptation.
John Goddard wrote to ask “What is the best way to date a pole? There are no plates or etched marks on this one. It ran along side the old north midland railway station at Darfield South Yorkshire. The photo of the old now long gone station below shows two of the post, now fallen asleep per the remaining pics. The station was built in 1840 and the tunnel behind was scalped in to a cutting in 1899 so the post must date somewhere in that range but would really like to know a more exact date if its possible”.
I could have replied with 17th March 1864 and few would have been able to disprove me. Last quarter of the 19th century is about as far as I would dare hazard. Anyway, a vintage pole like this is a serious find. And I wouldn’t mind betting that with some grubbing around in that undergrowth may produce some fine vintage insulators too.
Answers on a postcard as to whether, in the second photo below, you can just see either (a) the tip of John’s finger or (b) the tip of John’s nose.
Quite recently I went to the fair county of Gwynedd in North Wales. Actually, I’d taken my missus to Portmeirion for a birthday treat, but by uncanny coincidence right across the road from the place is the telegraph pole be-jeweled Ffestiniog Railway. I know I’ve posted photos from there before. But the whole Porthmadog to Ffestiniog section alone has an amazing collection of fully wired up poles for it’s whole 13½ miles length. Then there is the Porthmadog to Caernarfon bit which is even longer, though I couldn’t tell you about it’s pole situation because it was my wife’s birthday and me just nipping off with a camera all the time when I’m supposed to be feting her is asking for an ear-bending at best and body-part excision at worst.
I took a whole lot of photos with my phone and with my swanky black-bodied camera, that has lots of buttons and menus and things. Most of those you see below were from the most amazing last resting place called Mwynwent Minffordd (Minffordd Cemetery). I can just see myself getting planted there when the time comes – when that Dorian Grey painting I keep in the attic finally stops working.
Anyway. These were all intended for the TPAS 2026 calendar, but as you can see it was a very grey day and I decided they weren’t quite up to scratch. There is at least one more shed full of photos but those were shot in RAW mode and haven’t quite worked out which photoshop buttons to press to get the best out of them. Those may yet make it to a grey November 2026 page.
Albert Einstein’s Special relativity indicates that a correspondent may experience relativistic time dilation when expecting the email and photographs they sent to be published within the same inertial frame of reference from the recipient’s standpoint. Or something.
This is the only way to explain the near three years that have elapsed since Matt Brown’s email(s) and photographs were transmitted to the TPAS HQ inbox. And, hand on heart, I’m not sure I even understood that first paragraph.
Matt and his family are regulars exploring ye Olde Cuckoo Line (click to see previous article on subject). Matt is also a car restorer and is rebuilding a GPO Morris van. Now, the photographs you see below are from a series of emails and so I will summarise them here. Most are serendipitous finds along said disused railway line and nearby woods down there in East Sussex. They are hunting for telegraphic artefacts for the making of their very own pre-1960’s garden pole. The yellow truck you see is a forest find GPO truck as once used by TV detectors et al. Other gems in these pics: An undated pole with a star shaped cut out where the date might be, A GPO crown transfer (presumably for the van restoration), a selection of spooky tunnels, culverts and iron railings and a couple of restored Morris van panels.
Not the best photographs in the world., arguably. And camera not in the steadiest hand in the world. With Dutch angles particularly on the tunnel shots. And arguably, not the highest resolution camera in the world. But we enthusiasts can find interest in pretty much anything. Thank you Matt. I imagine you must have finished that van by now.
Messing about in Ireland again! Well I only live a modest distance from the ferry at Fishguard, so it’d be churlish not to. A splendid overnight in James Joyce’s former watering hole, the very fine Greville Arms Hotel, in the midlands town of Mullingar in Co. Westmeath. Mullingar won’t ever win any tidy town awards but it had an old Irish charm all of its own. And the railway station had a further delight for us in the overlooked, disused and too-close-to-everything-to-chop-down ancient telegraph pole you see below. And a station on a bend is worth two in the bush or something.
People who like telegraph poles often like old railways too and vice-versa. I’m no different. So next day we found ourselves at Castletown (5 miles SE) walking ye olde rail trail that once ran between Mullingar and Athlone (you remember Athlone don’t you?) Our meeting, along said trail, with an elderly Irish gentleman whose wonderful accent and false teeth that rattled as he talked is a story for another time, perhaps over a pint of something black and nourishing. Anyway, this trail still has lengths of track in places and is a haven for wildlife. In fact, Ireland is fully fifty years behind our UK depletion of nature. I hope they learn from our mistakes. The final photo in the sequence is a delightful croc-face replete with insulators and insulating coat of ivy. This was on the way home in Co. WIcklow. Without further ado.
Newport is in Wales. Just. It’s in Wales about as much as Berwick upon Tweed is in England. So close to “them” that “they” may as well have it. I am of the previously unshared opinion that the rest of wales is quietly ambivalent about ownership of this particular corner.
What do I know about Newport?
Well, I became intimate with the roundabout beneath junction 24 of the M4 during a stalled hitch-hike home back in my army days – specifically where the A449 branches north; the fans of Newport County football club could be friendlier (one savage purple-jumper wearing Newport fan has stayed long in the memory of my home town’s fans); AND nobody ever chose Newport as a holiday destination – except when confusing it with Newport, Pembs.
So, given the feeling in the rest of Cymru it was with some trepidation that long-term correspondent to these pages MartYn Fielder (a son of Abergavenny) had to visit the town with his mother for a medical appointment. He need not have worried. It was while waiting for the NHS to do its thing that MartYn followed his Indiana Jones urges and explored an old railway track bed in Malpas just to the north of the town. I’ll let his words describe his adventure:
“I came across the noble form of an old pole, forlorn in the splendour of its decaying grandeur. The pole is incredibly pock-marked, as though it’s been attacked by giant woodworm, and there are no identifying markers. It is also entirely alone – having walked all the way to the point where the old railway has been obliterated by the link road between the A4042 and the A4051 in one direction, and then followed it in the other direction where it has been transformed into a tarmac footpath wending its way through endless housing estates, I can confidently state that this is the only remaining telegraph pole on this stretch of the old Eastern Valley Line of the Monmouthshire Rail and Canal Company (1852) which closed in 1963. This splendid solitary specimen stands as a witness to a century of spectacular growth and slow decline in the industrial heartland of South Wales. A humbling thought.”
So there we have it. Newport, Gwent, still in Wales, has Big Mac’s Wholly Soul Band and a single old and isolated, redundant and woodpeckered multi-arm telegraph pole. The word “Yay!” comes to mind. Put Newport on my holiday list. Summer 2074 should do it.
Anyway, I looked it up recently, MartYn and I have been exchanging telegraph pole related missives for more than ten years now. He is this close ” to getting on my Christmas card list.
We all know about the Fabled Lost Pole of Bala Leisure Centre. Well here’s another lost pole and I think I’m going to use my high office as member #0001 of The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society to enfable it. Enfabling means that this becomes only the UK’s second ever Fabled Pole. This one is henceforth to be known as The Fabled Lost Pole of Norton Fitzwarren*1. So fabled is it, that all I can tell you is that it’s in some woods, on a footpath next to the West Somerset Railway.
For a pole to become fabled is the telegraphic equivalent of beatification – which is something highly churchy and to do with the making of saints. And I don’t mean Southampton Football Club.
Special thanks, as always, to completely favoured TPAS correspondent, Agent #0469H John Brundsen. John is a climber of poles by day and walker with ‘er indoors by weekend. His emails always make me pause as they are 100% always newsworthy. And this one is, to quote the vernacular, a “stonker”. It was John, you will remember, who provided this society with this view of Cornwall through a hole in a telegraph pole.
*1 There’s a rude joke here about Norton Fitzwarren, I’m sure, but we’re better than that.
Rick Howell (#0879) and Mrs Howell (hereafter known as Mrs H) voyaged to foreign parts recently – actually, it was last November. Rick’s email got lost in the gloop at the bottom of my inbox along with a fragment of biscuit, a burst ink cartridge and an email from a Nigerian prince. Anyway, geologically, November is almost yesterday, and cosmologically it’s instantaneous. So, right this second, Rick & Mrs H were speeding south aboard the Sydney to Melbourne express (40mph max he says) when he spotted these poles whizzing by.
Though he describes the photographic results as patchy, we have to remember he was incredibly excited at the sight of these multi-armed, fully strung, highly insulated telegraphic beauties all the while juggling the complexities of taking pics on a tablet whilst wincing at the incoming tuts from Mrs H sat alongside. She was of the opinion that he should stop taking telegraph pole photos and instead concentrate on the distressed and singed koalas and other wildlife – none of which are visible from this particular train window*1. Personally, I would have pulled the communication chord for a better look.
Rick valiantly persevered and the results of his efforts on our behalf you can see below.
“You see, much of the 600 miles had TPs – with wires!! Fair dinkum’ ” he reckons.
*1 Look carefully at picture #1 and you can just see the Australian fires starting. So Mrs H is either a soothsayer or went off on one a bit early doors. We may never know.
When I told Mrs TPAS that we were going away to Penrhyndeudraeth, or more specifically Minffordd in Gwynedd, for her birthday - she put two and two together and exciteldy assumed we were going to the charming and beautiful Italianate resort at Portmeirion. This folly village, now a global visitor attraction, was designed and built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925 and 1975. It is, of course, also the filming location for 1960's cult series The Prisoner. There is a shop dedicated to the series, and images and busts of the series star Patrick McGoohan everywhere. There are also plenty of Prisoner enthusiasts to be seen wandering the village in the series attire - ie the white-trimmed blazers, the rainbow capes and brollies etc. Portmeirion, in the opinion of the executive operations office of this society, is a gorgeous place to visit and should be on everybody's bucket list.
My mistake then, and arguably that of my wife, is to have put the wrong numbers together to get an even wronger answer. Which is how I now find myself and all my belongings in my temporary new accommodation which previously was our garden shed. You see, Minffordd is also a station on the Ffestiniog heritage railway which runs from Porthmadog (connecting with Welsh Highland Railway) up the nursery slopes of Snowdon to Ffestiniog. And it has one of the finest runs of restored heritage telegraph poles arguably anywhere in the world. Do see for yourself this fine collection of photos that I took before my newly-blackened eyes swelled up too much to see through the viewfinder. Oh, and treat yourself to one of our lovely books this Christmas, New Year, Easter, Equinox.
