Record PS–152 · Rural post driver · Caithness

Sheila Kerr

Ninety miles, forty-odd houses, and the customers she is deliberately late for.

Subject: Sheila Kerr
Occupation: Rural post driver
Route or region: Caithness
Recorded: 4 June 2025
Duration: 1 h 26 min
Reference: PS–152

Introduction

Sheila Kerr has driven a rural postal round in Caithness for nineteen years. The round is roughly ninety miles and serves somewhere in the region of forty households, a ratio that explains most of what is interesting about it.

Unusually for this collection, part of this recording was made in motion. Sheila offered, and we accepted, a morning in the passenger seat; the audio from that section has more road noise than we would normally publish and we have kept it anyway. The remainder was recorded stationary, parked above the harbour at Thurso.

She is not sentimental about the job and becomes visibly impatient with the suggestion that it is a vocation. She is, however, exact about her responsibilities, and the distinction she draws between what she is paid to do and what she does anyway is the spine of the whole recording.

Four excerpts from one hour and twenty-six minutes.

Recording location

Recorded in her van and afterwards at Thurso

Excerpts published

4 of the master recording. Timecodes refer to the unedited master file.

Access

Full audio and transcript are available to researchers on written request to the archive.

Transcript excerpts

Master duration 1 h 26 min

00:03:30

The round

It's about ninety mile if I do the whole of it, and it's forty-odd houses. Which sounds like nothing at all, does it. Forty houses.

But it's not the letters that take the time, it's the tracks. There's one at Shebster, the last mile of it — you'd not put a normal car up that. I've been stuck on it. Twice. [laughs] Same bit both times, which is the annoying part.

00:17:15

The only one

Interviewer

Are there people you're the only visitor for?

There's a few. Aye. There's a man out past Reay and I'd say Monday to Saturday I'm it.

He'll come out whether there's post or not — he'll have heard the van long before I'm at the gate. And you'll stand there and he'll tell you about the sheep, and you say aye, and you can't be in a hurry with it. I'm late every day because of that man. And I'll not stop being late, so there's no use anybody asking me to.

00:29:44

Wind, not snow

Everybody asks about the snow. It's not the snow. The snow's two days and it's away and half the time it doesn't lie.

It's the wind, and that's every day from October. On the coast road you can be side-on to it and you feel the van go light — you feel it come up off the road, just slightly. You learn to sit different. I don't know how to put it any better than that. You're leaning into it before it's arrived.

00:48:00

What's changed

There's far less letters and far more parcels, and there's houses now that are lived in a fortnight in August and dark the rest of it.

So I'm taking a lot back. There's a shelf in my porch — well. I shouldn't be saying that on a recording, should I. [laughs] No, they come and get them. They always come and get them.

Timecodes refer to the unedited master file. Hesitations, repetitions and dialect are retained as spoken.

Closing note

Sheila declined to be photographed at any of the properties on her round, on the grounds that “they didn't agree to anything”. The photograph above was taken on a public road at a point she chose. She has since taken on an additional stretch of the round to the south-east.

Elsewhere in the collection

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