Lastpostformail

It is with great sadness that I read of the Royal Mail suspending deliveries to remote homes in Altnabreac, Caithness, on the grounds that it is unsafe to travel for an hour on a private road without a phone signal (The Scotsman, 27 October).

I do wonder how I survived travelling 30,000 miles a year in some of Scotland’s remotest areas in the days before mobile phones with worse roads and cars.

Our road here too is private, and I suspect the Royal Mail van would be pushing it to be in and out within the 15 minutes they apparently allot, having served all 12 houses.

The reason it is private is that when the old turnpikes were turned into public roads lines had to be drawn somewhere and peripheral communities were left to look after their own roads, also their transport, their water supplies, sewage, and even, till not too long ago, electricity and waste disposal.

But our Angus glens are hardly remote, certainly not compared to Altnabreac, yet we, and much of Highland Scotland, share Altnabreac’s peripherality from a fearful urbanised population that is super-connected yet ignorant of us.

We don’t have, nor expect, mobile phone reception; for ten years or so in the 1980s until satellite we had no television and we are effectively to lose radio when it ceases broadcasting on FM. Don’t ask about broadband, it is a very expensive joke. The postal service in areas like ours is perhaps the most reliable social service. The posties over the years have all become friends to the community, performing a role way beyond the delivery of mail.

No amount of platitude on land reform will make up for the loss of essential fabric such as this.

HECTOR MACLEAN Balnaboth, Kirriemuir, Angus