Firstly, please accept my apologies for the dearth of posts on here of late. Excuses #1, #1b and #14 apply. We haven’t even tweeted much of late either. Goodness me, what sort of appreciation society is this?
Luckily for us, our hyper-active Norwich Branch of The Society have been on their annual peregrination. Their Honorary Secretary, Doreen Bracegirdle (Mrs) has just filed her report and photographs. I’m sure you can work out which image is which from the report. The question is begged however, of what Mrs Bracegirdle was doing with her camera in the gentleman’s water closet.
Members of the Norwich branch of the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society recently returned from their annual Spring charabanc outing. This year the destination was the western highlands of Scotland. Much haggis was enjoyed, a little whisky taken.
Members were saddened to see that many poles which once had us leaping excitedly from our transport and snapping away with our cameras have since vanished. But there still remained previously unrecorded treasures to be discovered.
Imagine our delight when, passing beneath the Shin Railway Viaduct near Bonar Bridge, one of our members spotted its two original metal telegraph poles extant. Metal poles were once a common sight on the rooftops of our great cities. Few of any sort must survive!
And what whoops of joy we let out when we encountered, on the Assynt peninsula to the north of Ullapool, a run of nearly three miles of (mainly) traditional poles along the B869 ….
running eastwards from the village of Clashnessie (pop: 38; telephone kiosks: 1). This switchback of a road is not one to be tackled by anyone who is faint-hearted or, as was sadly the case with our driver, drunk.
The Clashnessie poles happily survived the storms of this last winter, which is more than can be said for the phone box at Shegra, further up towards Cape Wrath. The locals told our members that, two months after the gust which took out this box, BT have only just reconnected all the phones in the village. Except this one of course, which has now been adapted for temporary storage by a neighbouring crofter.
After all our excitement, it was back to Norfolk and a quick pint at our local railway preservation centre, which does a good line in real ale. So disappointing, then, that someone had seen fit to deface a sign in the gentlemen’s “convenience”. Some people’s idea of humour.
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