The famous snowstorm of 1836 affected all parts of the country, and only on two mail routes were communications kept open. Fourteen mail-coaches were abandoned on the various roads, and for periods ranging from two to ten days the travels of others ceased. The snowstorm itself continued for nearly a week. The two routes remaining unconquered during this extraordinary time were those to Portsmouth and Poole, but precisely why or how they were thus distinguished is not made clear. There is no doubt that the coachmen and guards on the Portsmouth and Poole Mails were strenuous men, but that quality was common to many of those engaged upon the mails. Nor can we find any favouring circumstance of physical geography to account for this unusual good fortune. On the contrary, those roads are in places exceptionally bleak and exposed to high winds; and the strong wind that on this occasion bared the heights and buried the hollows twenty and thirty feet deep in snow-wreaths was an especial feature of the visitation. Fortunately for all upon the roads--for those who laboured along them, and for those who were brought to a standstill in the drifts--the cold was not remarkably severe. But never before, within living recollection, had the London mails been stopped for a whole night within a few miles from London, and never before had the intercourse between the South Coast and the Metropolis been interrupted for two whole days. On Chatham Lines the snow lay from thirty to forty feet deep, and everywhere, except on the hilltops, it was higher than the roofs of the coaches. Nay, according to a contemporary newspaper account, “The snow has drifted to such an extent between Leicester and Northampton as to occasion considerable difficulty and danger. In some parts of the road passages have been cut where the snow had drifted to the depth of thirty, forty, and in some places fifty feet.” The great difficulty with which the coaches had on this occasion to contend was not merely the getting along the roads, but, as with these extraordinary depths of snow the natural features of the country were mostly obscured, of keeping on or anywhere near the road. Hedgerows were blotted out of existence: many trees had fallen under their snowy burdens, and it was not unusual, when at last the snowed-up mails were recovered, to find them strayed far from their course, and in the middle of pastures and ploughlands.