Ireland Soar (Stamps On A Roll) IInformation

These are Castlecomer in County Kilkenny and Knocknagree, a very small village in County Cork.

Thanks FitzjamesHorse. I shall include snippet notations with these.

Speaking of town names, the paper of the Soar Stamps is bad to smear the cancellation, even when the full cancel hits the stamp. Then there is the other problem for us "foreigners". That being, that the new Celtic/Irish town names are very tough to find on the internet. I feel as though I've really accomplished something when I can pinpoint the town.

Thanks again for your help.

It is rare to see a place name in a cancellation and nearly always on Express or Registered Mail.
Ordinary mail is usually taken to four mail centres, which I think are Dublin, Athlone, Portlaoise and Cork and Cork will close or was due to close but happily the staff redeployed. Of course it is not always the case that stamps are posted in the mail box where they were purchased.
What we can see in your example is that the Castlecomer stamp was bought on 22nd August 2011 and as express post was cancelled in Caisleán na Chomair (you can just about make that out in your scan)
But the Knocknagree stamp 2411 was bought on 28th June 2012 and posted in Cnoc na Graí,
What was going on?
It looks like an item was posted (Express post) and then re-posted (Express Post with signature) almost a year later.
The Cnoc na Graí cancel is not totally clear but a logical guess.
The word "Cnoc" means "Hill" and will appear in quite a few Irish place names. "Cnoc na Graí" means "Hill of the Stud Farm".
It is not always the case that stamps are posted where they are bought.
I have maybe 25 or 30 mint stamps in various denominations that I carry around with me.
Post offices are under instructions to only sell a stamp in the minimum national rate. But if I go into a post office with (say) a strip of six 70cents stamps (old national rate) and innocently ask (with my northern accent) if I can have six stamps to top up to send to (say) Belfast they will happily sell be six 30cents stamps. And if I produce two stamps in say 1.35 and ask for a top up stamps (old international rate) they will sell me two at 35 cents stamps.
This means I will have all eight stamps in a roll if I am looking for a particular design.
Generally speaking staff are brilliant (a stamp collector is a novelty, fondly remembered by older staff) and I have a small list of very co-operative post offices who will cancel stamps and hand them back to me, especially if I dont want to risk a certain postcard or stamp in the mail.
In 1971 and 1981 the Post Office produced Guide Books which among other stuff, listed every post office in the Republic of Ireland and "Norn Iron" in English and Irish. The 1981 was more useful because the Irish spellings had undergone a re-vamp but unfortunately I loaned it to a brother in law who went and got himself divorced from my wifes sister and I never saw it again. I still have the earlier version.
The info included distance to next nearest post office etc.
Oh you might ask why buy eight stamps on a roll in say October when they were issued in January and I bought them at the Philatelic Counter (0250) on date of issue.
Well the 0250 stamps at the counter will be numbered 1 to 8 and are therefore not as authentic in my view as stamps bought in a regular post office. They will also be in national rate denominations.
In 2018 four stamps "popular commemoratives" were added to the "100 Objects" series for no apparent reason and only made available as a strip to collectors at the 2018 Stamps Exhibition.
Likewise two previously issued commemoratives were added (during 12019)to the 2019 eight "100 Objects" and only made available to collectors in September as a pair numbered #1 and #2.

FitzjamesHorse, thanks again for the very useful information.

The pic below compares the 3 main types of Irish SOAR printings collectors are likely to encounter. The ateeme website is very helpful for details on worldwide computer-vended stamps. The fonts, of course, are slightly different. The "philatelic" stamp's numbers have smooth edges because they are offset printed. Also, the 1-8 counting numbers are larger than the computer-vended stamps' counting numbers.

And, here is a pic of my latest acquisition from a mixture which arrived in yesterday's mail. Even, though it is not an ancient artifact, I love the clean design.

Not all the "objects" will be ancient. The most recent will be 2005.
It will include for example a ticket to the launch of the Titanic. And when that stamp is issued it will be nice to use it on a Titanic postcard (the most popular type of postcards in my part of Ireland)
There was a series of articles in the Irish Times which was turned into a book "100 Objects...." (Fintan O'Toole) and the stamps are based on the book. Started in 2017 and will probably end in 2021.
The stamps above....
Enniscorthy in County Wexford (1633)...I was there in July this year and got a photograph of both post offices in the town.
Harmonstown (1945) is a suburb about 5 miles north of Dublin City centre. Probably one of the first photographs that I took back in 2017.
9833 is listed as "Manor West Tralee" which seems to be a shopping mall in Tralee, County Kerry.

This is becoming a valuable thread for information, well done all of you !
Until this thread, had never encountered a SOAR stamp.

I try to copy most information here to my Ireland Catalogue folder.

Yes very helpful to me as well. Will be following along on John's blog which is also a wealth of information on the stamps of Ireland.

Thanks for the compliments folks.
The next scheduled post on my Blog will be 1st November which reviews the New Issues for October and includes an update on the latest SOAR stamps.

I am writing an article on the SOARs for The Revealer.

I will NOT go into details about the machines that spread them - where and how, etc, but it will be about the "base stamp" i.e. about the stamp BEFORE any machine/printer added some text,values etc.

So far, nobody had bothered about this, not even Brian Warren who had done an excellent job for years!

To give you some idea what it is all about:



The digital printer used for the base stamp of this is either composing the black text parts of 4 colours OR is using just black.

Several colours used to make up black:







Just black:

Very interesting Galeoptix. With the small text printing, one wonders why it was screened, when the solid black offset printing would have given a sharper image.

I have another question. With the Easter Uprising and 100 Objects series stamps, some have an odd symbol included in the design. At some point, An Post mentioned this, but I cannot find the information on their current postings.

The symbol is "augmented reality". If the stamp is scanned with a smart phone with a certain app, a person can get background information on the Easter Rising and info on the stamps.

@galeoptix.......Brian Warren had an excellent display on SOAr at "Stampa" earlier this month. I was briefly (2017) in IPC sister club to EPA (who publish The Revealer) and Brian had some info in their quarterly magazine.

In order to have the Augmented Reality the stamp needs to have a "hidden pattern"! Usually in yellow!

Wonders: "would that be the first smartphone on a postage stamp?"

Rod222
Actually, it may possibly have been Canada. In the innovations series issued in 2011 by Canada Post was a stamp commemorating the Canadian company Research in Motions invention of the "Blackberry smartphone" which changed the way the world communicates.

Claim for Netherlands having first augmented reality stamp (28 March 2011):