These much ignored pieces of rural and urban furniture finally have a website of their own.
This is not the site to visit for technical information pertaining to telegraph poles. You'll find nothing about 10KVa transformers, digital telephone networking or even so much as a single volt. This is a website celebrating the glorious everyday mundanitude of these simple silent sentinels the world over. We don't care what the wires contain either. They all carry electricity in some way be it the sparky stuff which boils your kettle, or the thinner stuff with your voice in it when you're on the phone.
Missing E
You’ve probably seen it on the news already, but a typographical error on the February page of the new Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society calendar has caused confusion and panic buying among aficionados. The error, comprising a single missing letter caused the word “there” to appear in print as “thre”. The mistake happened in the descriptive caption of a telegraph pole near Tomduen in Scotland. While the error didn’t cause any real misinterpretation of the words it did trigger collectors of misprints of official products to buy up stock and create a temporary shortage of this now collectable calendar.
TPAS spokesperson Stoddart E. Schmelmhausen told BBC News, “The letter E key on our society laptop has been giving us trouble for a while. You have to press really hard to make the key press register. And when you’ve typed more than 200 e’s in a day already, it’s no surprise when one gets missed. We promise we’re going to make it up in any reprints and in the 2027 calendar by adding extra letter e’s at no added cost. Meanwhile, we urge all telegraph pole fans to order their copies of the 2026 calendar now as stock levels are starting to show signs of distress. In the interests of fairness, we have to set a limit of 100 calendars per customer. And that’s not up for negotiation.”
Pole of many arms
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.
TPAS 2026 Calendar
Just when the news is full of dreadful things, here’s something to spark your day/month/year – the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Calendar is now with the printers and is expected to be delivered to TPAS Towers around 5th November. And as is bloody typical, just an hour after I’d sent off the artwork I spotted something I had intended to change. I’ll have to live with it now.
Anyway, here is what the April page looks like. A whole quid cheaper than last year too. Just £9.99 + p&p. No, I don’t know how we do it either. Have a look at it on the ordering page to see what else is on the other months. So celebrate the next year with twelve glorious months of views with telegraph poles in them. Wonderful.
Telegraph Pole Appreciation Day 2026
Ships in the Knight
For 25 years Gill Knight, artist, and this sage society have been searching for one another. 25 years of us looking for someone who gets poles like we do. And for Gill it was exactly the same. She’d slump into her sofa every night kicking off her shoes, defeated, another fruitless day’s searching for a society which truly reflected her love of all things “tall, wooden, sticky-uppy and with wires coming out of the top”.
We came close once or twice. There was that time when I was heading north up the M6 to a Dull Men’s Symposium in Preston, and Gill whizzed south from her home in Scotland and we passed with a combined terminal velocity of 140mph around junction 28 – the turn off for Clayton-le-Woods. Then there was that time in Venice. Our gondola had just turned into the Rio dei Tolentini canal when Gill’s gondolier steered her boat sharply into Rio del Malcanton just as we were about to come into view. Life’s like that sometimes. It was to be another 9 years of painstaking and abortive searches before Gill found us properly in an article online somewhere and when her heavily laden email clunked through my metaphorical letter box last week, I knew our search was over. Welcome to our sage and aged society Gill.
Below is a selection of some of Gill’s excellent paintings. Now you can see why we like them. And why Gill likes us. Have a look at her recent solo show on Robertson Fine Arts website. Or have a look at Gill’s website right here: https://www.gillknightart.co.uk/
Eric Ravilious
The 1930s was the great age of the motor car and touring the open road was almost mandatory for the vehicle owning classes. This idealised vision of the countryside was promoted by motoring organisations and any number of guide-books. Despite not being a driver himself, Eric found inspiration in this landscape. His paintings have a soft almost dreamlike quality and it is this undulating countryside with its endless lonely lane and line of poles that I find so endearing. Apparently, Eric only added the van at a later point having seen it in a Post Office magazine.
Captain Eric Ravilious served as a war artist but was killed at the age of 39 whilst aboard a Lockheed Hudson of RAF 269 squadron on a search and rescue mission off Iceland.
This painting, bristling with telegraph poles, lot #129, going, going, went for £242,500 at Christie’s, London in June 2014.
Meanwhile, I looked again at one of the photos in the previous post – a version of which had been used as January of our 2024 TPAS Calendar and I thought of Eric Ravilious. So I wanted to see what I could do myself. So I dug out my best gouache paints, some round and flat brushes and my favourite fine-tipped sable hair brush. I decided a 250gm heavy paper with a bit of texture to hold the paint and avoid warping would probably be best. Then I set up my easel, put on my smock and artist’s bucket hat and then got down to work….”ChatGPT please can you remake this image in the style of a Ravilious painting?”
We’ll start the bidding at £100,000. Who’ll give me £100,000? Thank you, £110,000? Yes sir, do I hear £120,000? …
Click images to enlarge…
Visiting old friends
And a new one.
There was a wasps’ nest in our local letterbox. So apologies to those folk who felt we’d dallied a little in getting your book and membership orders out to you. I know this sounds a little like “the dog ate my homework” kind of excuse, but truth was our postie refused to collect from it until some young lady exterminator from Aberystwyth had sorted things with a big stick. I did, at one point, poke my endoscope camera down there to see them sitting there. The parcels that is not the wasps – they were too busy asking me if I’d mind awfully going away. Anyway, wasps relocated now and the packages have been delivered.
In an effort to sort my work-life balance so that it weighs almost completely on the side of life, my feet have barely touched the ground this summer. Jollys here, trips away there, pub crawls everywhere. And whilst I was out and about I took the opportunity to visit a few old friends. I don’t have many friends so what I really mean is telegraph poles. And it’s arguably my relationship with telegraph poles that leads to me having no friends in the first place. And the damned “e” key is sticking again on this laptop. And the “a” key.
Little gallery below for you to peruse. You might recognise the first picture – it featured as January in our 2024 calendar. I go this way to walk into the wilderness beyond “Soar y Mynydd” chapel. I keep hoping to be handed some stone tablets with words of wisdom carved on to them whilst I’m up there but so far, nothing. Next up was my favourite, and arguably the world’s best “B” road – the B5105. The lovely little run of vintage poles between Ruthin and Clawddnewydd are largely still there. Some hiding in trees to avoid the poling gangs who would brutally yank them up and replace with a tarry vanilla job. Not unlike that which you see in the next picture. A brand new pole. 9 metre Medium pole preserved in 2025 and, according to the Openreach rule book nailed next to it, was planted just 3 weeks before my visit. This one is at the beautifully named Burlingjobb in Powys. Finally, more wilderness walks – high up into the Radnor Hills, over the delightful but windy “Whimble” and on up to Black Mixen. The Radnors seem to have a monopoly on great names for their hills. Anyway this power pole is the last of the run before the cable to Black Mixen telecom tower goes underground. So windy here it requires 5 stay wires (only 4 visible in this pic). This path, incidentally, borders the Harley Dingle explosive and ammunition testing ground which makes for some interesting flashes and bangs some days as they test out the very latest in Royal Mail Postbox Wasp clearing ordnance.
Eigg Nog
The entire staff of TPAS Towers recently undertook a telegraph pole expedition to the wee small isles in the inner Hebrides. Starting on the Isle of Eigg – an island entirely comfortable with rabbits, sheep and generating it’s own electricity – we settled in to our shed-esque accommodation and plotted the week’s hiking. Day one we discovered the bizarre bed-spring Heath-Robinson effort you see below. This seemed to be collecting the output from a small stream driven hydro-scheme just up from Galmisdale. Nothing but a climb up Eigg’s wonderful “An Sgùrr” mountain (393m) on day #2 and a trip to the telegraph pole free island of Muck on day 3.
Then day #4 we were walking the island’s only real road towards Laig Bay in the north and my internal telegraph pole detector started to ping. Peeping between the leaves of some birch trees was the tip of a redundant five-armed telegraph pole. I had just, that very morning, been reading about an old telegraph system that ran from Eigg, under the sea and across to Rum and then over again to Canna further north. This must be a remnant from those days. Now lost, forgotten and unnoticed. Until now, that is. I had to clamber down a steep hill and hack my way through some severe brambles to get to it but what is a few slashes, infected wounds and dislocated knees in pursuit of such beautiful telegraphic history?
Day #5 took us to Rum and, whilst there was nothing much there to telegraph to, it did at least allow us to join up the terms “Eigg” and “Rum” and make Eigg Nog. Thanks to poet Simon Cockle for the punny title to this post.
Our final evening saw us back at Laig bay, only a different route off the beach and my internal pole alarm started going bezerk. I looked about to see what could be causing this mental commotion when we spotted the rest of the redundant pole run coming down the distant hillside. Seven poles in all. We had a ferry to catch so only had time to squeeze some distant shots with phone camera held up to my binoculars and avow to come back possibly next year for a closer look. We did find a dead one however being consumed by the grass and so liberated a small part of that as a souvenir before it’s lost forever.
That wasn’t the end of our telegraph pole adventures though. On the way up I’d spotted a handful of neat four-armers roadside near Corpach, Fort William. As if that wasn’t enough already – further investigation and a nip up a side road revealed a stunning run of six-armers at Fassfern, also near Fort Bill. One final treat at Ballachulish – 3 armer with all it’s insulators missing (is that you Jake?) but a stunning backdrop of Sgorr Dheearg & Sgorr Dhonuill and also the road bridge itself. Well, well well as we say now back in Wales.
Canute’s Poles
A short walk down the coastal path from Llanon, Ceredigion, brought us to this rich stash of retired poles. They’ve clearly been part of a coastal defence scheme attempting to hold back the fierce Irish sea that smashes into this wild part of Cardigan Bay. The pole steps and inspection placards still visible on many of them. Ultimately the whole project was futile and the coastline has continued its eastwards march and is now some five metres beyond the “barrier” – now just an isolated run of skew-whiff sentinels, embarrassed at their own failure to be any help. Do see how the base of some of the poles has been gnawed away by the abrasive sand and pebbles. I spent a lot longer examining this wrecked wall than is decent even for an extremely curious nerd.
Resting in Peace
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.
