A brief holiday walking and cycling in West Somerset turned up a group of beautiful little bridges. So not one bridge but several this month.

This viaduct on the outskirts of Newquay has a chequered history. The original was a typical Brunel timber fan truss on stone piers, with a slightly longer span over the road. When the timber needed replacing the piers were widened and built up to level and topped with a metal girder. Finally, in the early 1900 the girders gave out and a stone arch structure was built. Probably through and around the working viaduct.

This month I am stepping aside from individual bridge studies to look at a few details of how they were built. There will be much more of this over the coming year or two but possibly not displacing bridges!

The bridge at Bowland has a surprisingly long flat span for random rubble. Few would expect it also to have hollow spandrels.

The tallest pier in this viaduct had been declared to be moving too much and in need of a new foundation. A friend had been asked to do the design but called me to look first. We were able to show that the movement was normal.

A brief lecture tour up the East coast of Australia allowed me to visit this, the oldest stone bridge on the mainland, built by convict labour in 1832/3. The stone is beautiful.

As a change from the normal fare, I offer a description of a centre for a 35m span arch built in the early 1900s. The engineer was Paul Paul Séjourné and the photograph around which this is built comes from his massive book of Grandes Voûtes. Once I started looking at this I was drawn in by questions and wanted to share the result of my thinking.

I had a quick visit to this skew bridge in Somerset when diverted this week. As always, there is more to it than a quick glance suggests.

I periodically come back to thinking about Stockport Viaduct. This time it was triggered by an old paper in ICE Proceedings. There is a lot going on and a lot to think about.

Trinity bridge sounds (and is) part of a religious foundation, but the trinity referred to is quite different. I have been hoping to get here for years.

Here is a very interesting symmetrical failure. It came to me as a question about ring separation in Archie support but there is much more than that going on here. Luckily it was walkable from a station I had to pass through.

This little bridge shows how a thin ring affects performance.

This bridge in Crete was washed out in a flood. Hamish got some good photographs when on holiday so it had to be recorded.

I have learnt a lot from the Marsh Lane viaduct down the years. Here are just some of the lessons.

A winding bridge allows tow horses to change sides without releasing the tow rope. This one has an interesting iron rib below.

Dairsie bridge is old, around 1520 in its present form but there was a bridge here in 1496.

My (well our) real work at Clifton is concerned with the masonry and particularly the vaults, especially in Leigh Woods pier. This month, as a wrap of month 100, I will look at some of the things we have done and found in there.

I knew I wanted something special for my 100th BoM but took far too long to realise that “special to me” was what I wanted. My uncle took me to Clifton when I was seven. I have a vivid memory of peering through the railings at the tiny cars and people below. You could do that then, now you can only poke a camera through.

I was asked about some issues with Rutters bridge and took the opportunity of a visit to friends to inspect and record it. Here is a detailed report associated with a 3D model you can download and inspect for yourself. It is long but I think worthwhile. I am posting just a short summary with a link to a pdf which looks rather different from usual.

The bridge at Kinclaven is relatively late for a "masonry" arch (1903-5) but has a lot of interesting things to tell us. The main visible parts are stone but the voussoirs are precast concrete and the bulk of the arch mass insitu concrete.