Hinton St George was issued with a 29mm serif undated double-arc handstamp on 21st November 1843 under Crewkerne. The UDC is known used in brown/black and in blue. The first example below is currently the earliest known usage of the UDC.
This next example, from September 1851 appears brown rather than black.
The next two sheets show the UDC in blue, from January 1858 and March 1858 (currently the earliest and latest reported examples).
The item below was send from Taunton to Obridge in October 1872 as Printed Matter. It has got a manuscript "Letter 1d" with initials, but there is no indication that any postage due was collected.
The item below is a receipt for interest from the Minehead Turnpike Trust from December 1859.
The Turnpikes were necessary to support Mail and Stage coaches, providing a reasonable road surface (rather than roads that were 100 yards wide with travellers trying to find a bit that was not boggy or rutted). The McAdam road surfaces (after John McAdam) consisted of a layer of medium sized stone with a layer of smaller stone on top, filled in with stone dust. The key thing was that the size of the top stones was smaller than the width of the coach tyres.
When cars started going along faster they sucked up the stone dust and destroyed the roads, so a layer of tar was applied to the top - hence Tarmacadam or tarmac. Current roads apply the top layer as a mixture of stone and tar (rather than spraying tar on top).
In July 1849 the entire below was sent from Crewkerne to Ilchester where the recipient refused it, so it went back to Crewkerne. This may have been because the contents were a letter informing the recipient that the landlord's agent would be calling to collect the rent.
More UDCs, starting with a couple of examples of the Hambridge UDC, one in blue-grey and one in black (the only example in black currently recorded).
Here is an example of the Hazelbury UDC (now Haselbury Plucknett) used in 1856. It also has a poor example of the Galhampton udc being used as a receiving mark - Galhampton is less than four miles from South Barrow where the card was addressed to.
The Hatch [Beauchamp] udc is known in yellow and red as well as in blue. It is possible that the yellow and red examples were both originally red.
Finally here is an example of the Henlade udc from 1857.
Watchet's 'Dulwich' cancel (double circle double-arc, a type first introduced at Dulwich) was in use from at least 1959 to 1971 - I think it is the same cancel for the whole of this period.
The postcard below was franked with a halfpenny stamp in 1928, at least 10 years since the Postcard Rate was a halfpenny. It has got a 1d charge mark from Wellington. The postcard is advertising the Taunton Historical Pageant in 1928.
Four different PAID daters for unified machine cancels are known for Weston-super-Mare, two of which are only known by a single example. Here are the two common ones.
More random postmarks for the Somerset PH Catalogue - starting with two different postmarks from North Petherton in the 1960s.
Porlock used the postmark below for at least 1959 to 1972 (if you've got an example outside this date range do let me know).
The only postmarks I had for Timsbury were small Edwardian single rings and an UDC.
It looks as if Walton used the same postmark from 1944 to 1975 - it's looking degraded by 1975.
Here is an item associated with a previous Coronation, that of King Edward VII in 1902. It is an invitation to Tea in honour of the coronation. As King Edward VII's coronation did not go ahead as originally scheduled (he had to have an emergency operation on a table in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace), it is not clear if this Tea Party went ahead as scheduled.
In a fit of madness I have started a Catalogue of the Postal Markings of Somerset, available online at https://sites.google.com/site/sanddphg/home/somerset-ph-catalogue. It does not include the marks of the post offices under Bristol which can already be found at https://sites.google.com/site/bristolphg/home/offices-under-bristol.
This means that this blog can now contain any postmark from Somerset (& Bristol & elsewhere) that I haven't seen before or that has a new date - however poor or potentially boring an example it is !
Edington is a new Post Office to me ...
... while I did not have this particular Frome cancel. To distinguish similar cancels I find the best approach is to scan the cancels, fiddle with one to make the background transparent and then overlay one on top of the other. This can add a fair bit of time to processing a new cover.
The only postmarks I'd had from Huntspill previously were UDCs - here is a more modern one from 1960 - which I call a "double circle double blob" cancel.
