For a number of years, I’ve driven from Berkshire (and before that, was driven as a child from London) to Dorset, south west England, to visit various family members. An intriguing feature of the drive is the “Red Post”, at Bloxworth, near Wareham. It is an otherwise ordinary rural finger-post but painted red, with the placenames picked out in white lettering.
There are other such posts dotted around Dorset and the south west of England (possibly elsewhere as well), including one which, when I went that way last year, had been vandalized, on the road between Beaminster and Evershot (below).
One theory I have head is that they mark the sites of gibbets/gallows, although I haven’t been able to find any documentary verification of this. Also, it seems a bit unlikely and impractical to bring felons to the middle of nowhere to execute them.
Some are marked with the legend “Red Post” on the nineteenth century OS six-inch series maps, but some (including the Bloxworth post above) are not. I’ve come across a general public Act of Parliament of 1753 consisting of
A BILL for Repairing, Amending, and Widening the ſeveral roads leading from the Red-Poſt, in the Pariſh of Fivehead, where the Taunton Turnpike ends, through the Pariſh of Curry Rivell, the Towns of Langport and Somerton, to Butwell … etc
This suggests some considerable antiquity to the phenomenon; and that in the eighteenth century, Red Posts were well known and visible as waymarkers. So I am digging a bit more. I have a few ideas, and I hope that 2020 will bring a slightly more formal publication on the matter, on one platform or another.
This is a plea, in the meantime, that if anyone familiar with the English countryside knows anything about its Red Posts/Poſts , then I’d love to hear from you…
Stuart Dunn 