Here’s another rural Welsh phone box from Mum and Dad’s adventures last year.
(Coordinates 52°00’84.1″N, 5°01’51.0″W.)
This box had sadly been emptied of its phone and contained a notice informing the community that it would soon be removed and sent off to the phone box graveyard. RIP phone box. It had become fairly well-kept since the Google Street View photo was taken too 🙁
Here’s another fairly rural box that Mum and Dad found in Wales last September.
(Coordinates 51°97’89.0″N, 5°05’73.9″W.)
This box has been repurposed for a defibrillator now (great news!) – you can see it alongside Dad’s photo-taking reflection in the picture! You can also still see the phone box in its previous tired state in the Google Street View image linked above.
Another phone box from Mum and Dad’s Welsh trip, this time in Laugharne (most famous as the resting place of Dylan Thomas).
(Coordinates 51°77’17.1″N, 4°46’25.9″W.)
The paint on this one is a bit faded, but the surroundings are very pretty. The box now contains a defibrillator instead of a phone, which is top quality phone box re-use!
More from Wales next week.
This week sees the second phone box that Mum and Dad found at the National Museum of History.
(Coordinates 51°48’77.6″N, 3°27’80.3″W.)
Again, this phone box is part of a museum, so it’s very well-kept! I’m glad to see these examples being looked after – it’s so depressing when they’re left to rot at the side of the road until someone ships them off to the phone box graveyard.
The next few boxes from Mum and Dad’s Welsh trip sadly do include some doomed specimens. Stay tuned for the next few weeks…
This week, we move on to a series of Welsh phone boxes that Mum and Dad found for me while travelling last September. This first one resides in the St Fagans National Museum of History next to the Blaenwaun Post Office, and has been moved there specially (i.e. is not in its original location).
(Coordinates 51°48’76.9″N, 3°27’71.7″W.)
It’s a very well-kept box, but that’s to be expected seeing as it’s being treated as a museum piece! The Google Street View image linked above seems to suggest that the phone box is still in use, but I expect the image is a few years old so it’s unclear if that is still the case.
More from the St Fagans museum next week.
We’re back to our regularly scheduled jaunts around Dumfries and Galloway, where Mum and Dad continued to find a healthy number of phone boxes after getting back from Shetland. This week’s example comes from Haugh of Urr.
(Coordinates 54°97’68.8″N, 3°86’38.7″W.)
This phone box had sadly seen better days, and unfortunately was scheduled to be sent to the great red phone box graveyard in the sky North Yorkshire shortly afterwards, according to a notice inside the box. RIP Haugh of Urr phone box 🙁
Here’s the second of the phone boxes along the Bressay parkrun route, and the final phone box from last August’s Shetland trip.
(Coordinates 60°13’73.9″N, 1°11’39.0″W.)
Since the Google Street View car visited the area (which was probably around 2009 judging by their usual dates for rural Scotland), the phone box has had its ‘Telephone’ signs redone in a nice gold and black scheme. I’m not usually a fan of meddling with the classic phone box design, but it does look quite nice.
Back to the UK mainland next week!
Bressay parkrun, which Geth and I did while in Shetland last summer, is the only parkrun course I’ve run so far that has red phone boxes along the route (Highbury Fields parkrun has a couple very close by, but not quite en route). Bressay has two of them – it’s not quite beating the London Marathon’s phone box haul, but it’s still fairly impressive! Here’s the first one we photographed, which is on Gunnista Road close to the parkrun finish line.
(Coordinates 60°15’01.8″N, 1°11’18.2″W.)
It’s a bit weather-worn, but I actually quite like the effect on the red paint!
I’ll post the other Bressay parkrun phone box next week.
A nice quiet Sunday today – a run followed by an afternoon/evening of videogaming. Back to work tomorrow!
Today’s earworm playlist:
Lightwood Games – ‘Link-A-Pix Theme’
Tomohito Nishiura – ‘Searching For Clues’
Here’s another phone box that the family found while exploring Shetland! Photo courtesy of Steff.
(Coordinates 59°97’35.7″N, 1°32’38.4″W.)
Another fairly well-kept example by the look of things!
We move away from the Shetland mainland next week.