Loveday Strachan-Imrie Kept 3,411 Cards. Twenty-Nine Of Them Are Still Open.
For forty-four years she telephoned three police stations every Monday at nine and ruled a card for every person lost on the mountain. She was never paid, never held a post, and was wrong once, for thirty-one years.
LLANUWCHLLYN, Wales — Three thousand four hundred and eleven cards. Nineteen shoe boxes on one shelf in a box room above a farmhouse kitchen. Twenty-nine of the cards carry the word open, in pencil, in her hand.
Loveday Strachan-Imrie died at home at Tŷ Isaf on 14 June. She was 88. The cause, according to her son and the death certificate, was pneumonia after a fall.
For fifty-four years she kept the only consolidated index of people reported missing across this range of mountains. She was never paid for it. She never held a post of any kind.
The Monday call
Every Monday at nine she telephoned three police stations — Dolgellau, Bala, Porthmadog — and asked the same four questions in the same order.
The cards are ten years older than the calls. She ruled the first in 1972.
She began ringing in 1982, the year after a boy of fifteen from this village was lost for nine days and the three stations gave her three different last-seen points when she rang to ask which hill to walk.
Sergeant Handel Prichard-Moss took the Bala call for eleven years. He kept his own note of it in a duty book. The shortest call was four minutes. The longest he recorded was fifty-one.
"She never asked us for anything we would have had to refuse," he said. "That is why it went on for forty-four years."
What was on a card
Name. Date last seen. Six-figure grid reference. Status.
Then the margin, which is the part that is gone.
The margins say which relative to ring, and at what hour, and which ones asked to be told only if there was something to tell. Ring the brother, not the mother. After six. Do not ring at all in February. She would rather have the truth on the doorstep than on the telephone, and has said so twice.
Coroners' officers used the box. Two rescue teams used it. Three police stations used it, which is to say that the institutions that could not fund the work borrowed the woman who was doing it anyway.
The thirty-one years she was wrong
In May 1974 a quarry fitter named Emlyn Rhys-Corbett walked out from Llanuwchllyn and did not come back. His card is number 1,208.
In 1979 she added a sighting to the margin: a man in a red anorak at a bus stop in Bala, two days after, reported second-hand by a conductor.
It was wrong. In 2005, working from the bus company's rota and a wedding photograph, she established that it had been a different man, on a different hill, on a different day.
She typed a correction card, filed it in front of the original, left the original where it was, and wrote to the family to say so.
Her son says she typed it because she wanted it to look official and had nothing official to type it on.
What the state kept
When the national database was built in 2011 it ingested her index in six weeks. The specification, obtained under freedom of information, carries four columns: name, date, grid, status.
There is no free-text field in the schema. There never was one. The margins were not deleted; there was nowhere to put them.
The only comparable series in this newspaper's vault, thirty years of one force's own log PX-2179, records what was reported and what was attended. It has no column for who was told, or when they asked not to be.
This correspondent's field notebooks PX-1701 place every sighting by grid reference because a grid reference is the one thing two people can agree on. Her cards did that from 1972 and then added the column that decays first.
The codicil
She left the index to the mountain rescue association with one condition: that it not be digitised until the families named on the open cards have been asked.
Twenty-nine letters. The association has sent none of them yet and its secretary has not decided what they will say.
What this desk takes from it
The index was never uncanny and she disliked the suggestion. There is no pattern in her grid references beyond the three waymarked paths and the two car parks, which the association plotted itself, on one sheet, in 1994.
What there was, was a woman with a telephone and a discipline, doing on Mondays what no agency had been funded to do on any day.
Three weeks before she died she recited all twenty-nine telephone numbers, in order, when her son asked whether she still had them.
She is survived by her son, two grandchildren, nineteen shoe boxes, and one card filed in front of another card that she could have thrown away and did not.
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Sources & Method
We did not go looking for a pattern in the grid references, because the association had already plotted them and the plot follows the footpaths. We went to count the cards: all 3,411, over five days, with a trustee at the table and every margin photographed. We then obtained the 2011 ingest specification under freedom of information, laid her cards against the four columns it kept, and telephoned the one family she had ever written to about a mistake.
Who we spoke to
- The index, 3,411 cards in nineteen shoe boxes; held by the Meirionnydd Mountain Rescue Association since 4 July 2026. Read and counted over five days at the association's premises with a trustee present; every card photographed, margins included, at the family's request July 2026 Our count and the association's agree at 3,411. Twenty-nine cards carry the word open in her hand.
- Meurig Strachan-Imrie, Her son, 61, a sheep farmer at Tŷ Isaf. Interviewed at the farmhouse over two days, again by telephone, and given the full draft before publication July and August 2026 Asked for one change and we made it: the word hobby does not appear in this story.
- Sgt. (retd.) Handel Prichard-Moss, Took the Monday nine o'clock call at Bala from 1988 to 1999. Interviewed by telephone twice, and sent every passage that quotes him July 2026 Kept his own note of the calls in a duty book. The shortest was four minutes. The longest he recorded was fifty-one.
- Rhiannon Ackroyd-Vaughan, Secretary of the association and executor of the bequest. Interviewed in person; produced the codicil, the minute books from 1984, and the association's callout map July 2026
- Ingest specification and field map, national missing-persons database, Fourteen pages, dated March 2011, with the field map at annex B. Obtained under freedom of information after an internal review; released entire but for two officials' names May 2026 Four columns carried. The schema has no free-text field anywhere in it.
Documents
- PX-2179 — Thirty years of one police force's wildlife-report log, 1996–2026, with the 1980 capture file accepted
- PX-1701 — Point Pleasant field notebook, S. Brindisi, vols. 3–4 accepted
What we could not confirm
- Whether the index was ever complete, and we do not think it can have been. She recorded what three stations told her on a Monday morning. A person reported on a Tuesday to a fourth station, in a neighbouring force area, reached her card only if somebody happened to mention it. We can count the cards that exist. We cannot count the people who never got one.
- Whether the 2011 ingest dropped her margins as a decision or as a consequence. The field map shows four columns and no free-text field. One official told us a notes column was discussed and cut for cost; a second told us it was never on the table. The decision log for that meeting is not held, and the department says so in writing rather than pretending otherwise.
- Twenty-nine of anything. We have verified that twenty-nine cards are marked open in her hand as at June 2026, and we have not established whether any of the twenty-nine was closed elsewhere without her being told. Two of the telephone numbers she recited in May are no longer in service. We did not ring the other twenty-seven, and that was a decision of this desk rather than an oversight, taken because her codicil asks that the families be approached by the association and not by a newspaper.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphTHE MOUNTAIN'S OWN LEDGER: The Widow Who Knew Where They Would Vanish
Plotted her grid references, found three clusters, and presented the clusters as knowledge she could not have had.
Had that we did not
The twenty-nine open cards, correctly counted, and a good photograph of the box room.
Left out
That the three clusters lie along the three waymarked paths and the two car parks, which the association's own callout map shows on one sheet.
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ApertureIn The Margin
An essay on marginalia, grief and the handwriting of women nobody employed. Better written than this piece.
Had that we did not
The margins themselves, quoted at length and more beautifully than we quoted them.
Left out
The 2005 correction card, and the thirty-one years before it — the only part of the index she asked anybody to remember.
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They Buriedthis newspaperLoveday Strachan-Imrie Kept 3,411 Cards. Twenty-Nine Of Them Are Still Open.
Counted every card, read the margins, obtained the 2011 field map, and telephoned the family she had been wrong about.
Had that we did not
The full count, the correction card photographed front and back, and the ingest schema in full.
Left out
We give nine paragraphs to the error and two to the Mondays. She kept the Mondays for forty-four years and made one mistake, and this story is shaped like the mistake. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Delyth Rhys-Corbett, daughter of Emlyn Rhys-Corbett, missing since 11 May 1974 by telephone on 21 July 2026, in a call that began by telling her why we were ringing; sent the full draft, the 1979 card, the 2005 correction card and the ingest schema on 29 July, with three weeks and no deadline. Replied by letter on 14 August 2026, asking that it run entire. Printed unedited, including the last paragraph, which is about us.
You telephoned me because my father is your best paragraph. You said so, in the first minute, before you asked me anything, and then you sent me the whole thing to read. I am fifty-eight and nobody has done that before, so I will answer you properly.
Mrs Strachan-Imrie was not kind to us and she was not unkind. She was accurate. I have come to think that is the rarer thing and that people confuse the two.
In 1979 she wrote nine words in a margin — a man in a red anorak, Bala, the Wednesday — and those nine words ran my mother's life for twenty-six years. My mother kept a bag packed by the door. She would not move house, because of the address. She would not go abroad. She was a clever woman who spent her Saturdays on a bus route, and she died in 2003 still believing that my father had walked off a hill and got on a bus.
Then in 2005 a woman of sixty-seven sat down at a typewriter and wrote a card that said she had been wrong, and filed it in front of the old one instead of destroying the old one, and posted me four paragraphs with her telephone number at the bottom, and answered that telephone when I rang her at eleven o'clock at night and did not once tell me to calm down.
You have written that up as the good part of your story. Understand what the good part cost. It is the day I learned that my mother spent the last twenty years of her life waiting at a window for a man who was already on the mountain, and that the waiting had come out of a margin, in pencil, second-hand, from a bus conductor who was never asked twice.
I do not blame her for the nine words. I would have written them down too. What I want your readers to notice is that she is the only person in thirty-one years who went back and checked, and that nobody paid her to and nobody asked her to and no procedure required it. That is not tidiness. That is a moral act performed at a kitchen table by somebody with no standing whatsoever.
Now the codicil, which you call scrupulous. It is a question with my name on it. She has left the association a decision she could not take and it will arrive as a letter asking whether my father's card may go into a computer, and I have been avoiding that letter since 2005. Do not print the codicil as though it were a gift to everybody. It was a gift to some of us and a bill to the rest.
And one thing about your language, which you may leave in or take out. You call her an amateur twice. She was unpaid. Those are not the same word. One of them describes her and the other describes everybody else.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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