The Milestones Society joins The Heritage Alliance

Editor News

The Heritage Alliance is pleased to welcome The Milestone Society as their newest member!

Unlike other ‘listed buildings’, milestones are usually too small to have their own individual ‘Friends’. Since 2001, the Society’s volunteers have been collating information on them and learning the most appropriate ways of caring for these quirky lumps of rock and rusting metal sitting quietly by the wayside.

The Milestone Society’s members have identified and recorded over thirty thousand waymarkers of the British Isles; as well as Milestones, these include Guide Posts, Boundary Markers, Fingerposts, Toll Houses, Canal Mile Markers and other heritage objects pointing the way. Photographs of many of these are displayed on Google Earth mapping on our own Repository website and on Geograph.org.uk. Their collections also feature on the Heritage Gateway, OS and other sites.

Roadside milestones are owned by the Highways Authorities but are at risk from vehicle impacts, road works, hedge cutters, theft, vandalism and casual neglect.

The Society’s purpose is to encourage people – the Highways and Local Authorities, Parishes, civic societies, walkers, local history groups, individuals – to care appropriately for their distinctive vernacular milestones, which recall a travel and transport history of times gone by.