Being a postie on the north coast in winter is no picnic
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The Postie Notes by Pete Malone
A major problem for posties at this time of the year are the road conditions which range from challenging to downright dangerous.
Our early starts and the lack of traffic on the road - more so during lockdown - means that the grit laid down has not had a chance to work into the snow and ice.
A few years ago a colleague managed to spin his van on a patch of black ice on the Syre to Kinbrace road and ended up in a ditch. It was a close shave as a logging lorry passed immediately after.
I wouldn’t have fancied his chances if he’d been struck by a fully loaded vehicle while performing “Dancing On Ice” manoeuvres in his postie van.
He was picked up by some foreign drivers (pre-Covid times obviously), who were doing tests on road mapping for driverless vehicles, and brought safely back to home base.
This winter we haven’t been able to reach Kinbrace on a number of occasions. We can often get as far as Syre before being forced to turn back.
As you start the long slow crawl up the hill from Syre to Loch Rosail you can often tell whether your journey is going to be successful or not. If there are no tyre tracks in the snow and you can only see sheep or deer tracks, then you might as well call it quits there and then.
If no crofter with a 4x4 has made it from Badenloch, then a postie in a van that has all the stability on ice of a newborn lamb is not going to make it.
Worse still is getting further on and finding that the van is either standing still or even sliding backwards. With passing places full of snow and the edges of the road obscured, turning round to head back to base becomes an adventure all of its own. Reverse or try a three-point turn? What’s worse? Backwards into the ditch or getting stuck sideways across the road?
The weather at Syre can be very different to that at Bettyhill. While there may be a dusting of snow at Bettyhill, you could be looking at five-feet drifts at Syre. Contacting base to say you are turning back, you can sometimes sense their incredulity at the difference in conditions from one place to the other.
A few weeks ago, a customer on the route telephoned to say that the Strath was quite icy so I set off with a trepidation and not surprisingly the road got pretty slippy. With the post van staggering side to side like a drunkard, I decided to abandon my van at Strathnaver village hall
Thankfully I was rescued by a local ghillie who brought me back to the sorting office where I was able to do some of my route on foot before borrowing another vehicle to complete my day’s work, and then setting off to rescue the van so that it would be available for the next day
The consolation for all the hassle of winter driving is the scenery. Snow capped mountains and fields of unbroken white with deer sprinkled across the white expanses of the parks. Frozen roadside lochans and waterfalls constructed of ice appear in turn to delight and enchant.
It gives an opportunity to take a photo or to stop and appreciate the beauty that is all around and which we sometimes take for granted. Mind you – it’s hard to do that if you’re sliding backwards down a brae past the startled gaze of a sheep that is the only living thing you’ve seen for the last 10 miles.
Pete Malone is a postman at Bettyhill.
