Related
Every path tells a story – a Walking Writers’ Salon with Alan Cleaver
Alan Cleaver, a former journalist and more recently a walking guide book author has a long-held fascination in handwritten letters and how they have been delivered. The Postal Paths, his new book coming in April 2025, celebrates and honours the endeavour of the rural postal delivery service.
• Discovering creativity while walking Britain’s Postal Paths
Alan Cleaver is an author from Whitehaven, Cumbria UK whose latest book, The Postal Paths, looks at the routes walked by rural postmen and postwomen from the 1850s until the 1970s (vans are now used for all delivery routes in Britain) and the lives of the posties who walked them. Alan will be on a
A 100 day walk across Europe with a wolf for company
Video recording of a Walking Writers Salon with Adam Weymouth, author of Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe. Conservation policies across Europe have been encouraging ‘re-wilding’ of landscapes, including the re-introduction for animals that once roamed more freely. Scientists have been tracking such re-introductions, and back in 2011, a wolf left its family pack
• • Renegade Guides Handbook
The Renegade Guides Handbook, a new resource created with and for walking guides, is now live and available to download for free from Saira Niazi‘s Living London website. Alternatively, you can purchase a physical copy on her online bookshop.. The handbook is filled with practical advice, reflections, case studies, stories, ideas and a manifesto. I am sure it will be of
• Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London
A captivating history of the city at night and the people, writers and workers who inhabit the London darkness In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Matthew Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: the fetid, treacherous streets known to Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations;
• Seeing the hills, the crofts, villages and ruins only tells half the story. The people who worked, walked, lived and died here are the other half.
Postal paths span the length and breadth of Britain – from the furthermost corners of the Outer Hebrides to the isolated communities clinging to the cliffs of the Rame Peninsula in south-east Cornwall. As far back as the 1660s, postmen and women have been moulding and forging paths to deliver posts to homes across Britain, no matter how remote.
A chance remark by a farmer about a Postman’s Path led Alan Cleaver on a quest to discover more about this network of lanes, short-cuts and footpaths in the British landscape. What he found, through his walks, conversations and painstaking research, was more than just beautiful scenery. It was an incredible, forgotten slice of social history – the remarkable tales and toil of rural postmen and women trudging down lanes, over fields, and even across rivers to make sure the post always came on time.
From women like Hannah Knowles, who began her job delivering letters in 1912 and would only miss three days through illness over the next 62 years of service, to WW1 veteran Matt Bendelow, who managed his 9-mile delivery route on one leg, Postal Paths paints a vivid picture of the people who not only served their communities but, more often than not, built them.
From the rolling fells of Cumbria to Kent’s shingle coast, Postal Paths is a journey through Britain’s past – and its future.
Published: Monoray Books 24 April 2025
One thought on “The Postal Paths: Rediscovering Britain’s Forgotten Trails and the People Who Walked Them”
You must be logged in to post a comment.