Hobbies and Pastimes

Letterboxing

Citation Formats

General Reference

Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas. "Letterboxing." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://home.interactiveatlas.org/hobbies/letterboxing.

APA Style

Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas. (n.d.). Letterboxing. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://home.interactiveatlas.org/hobbies/letterboxing

BibTeX

@misc{home,craftsandhobbiesatlas-letterboxing,
  author = {Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas},
  title = {Letterboxing},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://home.interactiveatlas.org/hobbies/letterboxing},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

A hiking-based treasure hunt: participants follow written clues to a hidden, weatherproof box holding a logbook and a carved rubber stamp, leaving their own stamp's impression in the box's logbook and stamping the box's own mark into a personal logbook as proof of the find.

Facts

Hobby Class

Observing and Seeking 1

Established When (Circa)

The practice began on Dartmoor, Devon, England in 1854, when the guide James Perrott placed a bottle for visiting cards at Cranmere Pool on the northern moor. It stayed a local Dartmoor practice of no more than a dozen sites for over a century, with a memorial letterbox placed at Duck's Pool in 1938, before spreading more widely from the 1970s onward. 1

Sources

1. Letterboxing (Wikipedia)

Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing_(hobby)

Quote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing_(hobby)

The origin of letterboxing can be traced to Dartmoor, Devon, England in 1854.

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