I spent the last three days on site near Newcastle and on my way to the train home got a daylight look at the bridge over Dean Street and Side in Newcastle. This is actually two bridges for the price of one.

When we visited Otterton Mill, I took the opportunity to photograph the main bridge and a coupe of smaller ones in the village. For such a small village, Ottery offers a lot of bridge interest for it has a stream running along the main street. These bridges serve individual houses and carry different weights of traffic. The main bridge over the otter is modest, but rather fine in its way.

This delightful bridge in Dentdale is long gone. The pictures surfaced in a collection of slides I had copied recently. The arch began fairly flat and long with negligible cover. When I first saw it back in the 70s it was already distorted but still in use. I went round that way deliberately to get a fresh photo and was sad to find it had given up. Perhaps the farmer moved on from his little Fergie and
the bridge couldn’t deal with it.

What I really went looking for in August was this skew bridge to the north of Todmorden at Cornholme. The railway is more skew than the bridge, but even the bridge is skewed at 60 degrees. The main reason for going is that the pictures I had, supplied via an inspector some years ago) were too dark and too restricted to be really useful.

At the end of August, I was on my way to Cornholme to look at a very skew bridge I had interacted with through Archie-Help some years ago but never seen. Just a mile before that, I came across this bridge at Todmorden. I still can’t quite work out why there is so much going on when the core damage is obviously very old.

I have been travelling for the past two weeks and while I was away,
I visited the Scottish Lime Centre at Charlestown on the north shore of the Forth. Many years ago (possibly 30) I came across a little viaduct there with a serious crack and I went back to look for it.

If you don’t know Durham, it is well worth an outing with two big medieval bridges and magnificent cathedral, plus a railway viaduct that will feature here soon. The two bridges, Elvet and Framwellgate carry a now pedestrianised road across the narrow neck of land which isolates the castle and cathedral in a loop of the River Wear. Elvet has a row of modest pointed spans but Framwellgate crosses the river in two enormous segmental arches declared to be 26.5 and 25.1m span. There is actually a third, much smaller, span on the city
side which is now hidden by surrounding buildings.

Here is one I have wanted to get to for many years. A couple of weeks ago I had to leave a site at the Lambton Estate at 18:00 which left a short bike ride and plenty of light to get to Victoria. I am pretty sure it is disused, was only ever single track but it is the biggest railway arch in England.

This note describes the monitoring implemented during the ElevArch trial at Moco Farm in 2016. The monitoring had three components:
1. Before and after load tests.
2. Continuous monitoring of span change throughout the construction sequence.
3. More intensive monitoring during jacking operations, with a “dashboard” style display.

This month I had the double pleasure of 3 days in Bath which gave me time to have a good look at Pultney Bridge. It is a rather more elegant thing than most bridges I deal with, designed by Robert Adam. At first glance, and to be honest, over many “glances” for me, it looks like an elegant piece of Palladian symmetry. In fact, a close look reveals it to be far from symmetrical. The domed pavilions at the two ends are different and very differently placed.

So what is special about Twemlow? The first thing to note is the stable it comes from. Same line, same engineer as the famous Stockport viaduct but with the advantage, from our point of view, that it is a bit lower (so accessible) and hasn’t been widened. You will find it just outside Crewe. As you can see, it is substantial.

Although arches in buildings and walls aren’t bridges, the behaviour is only slightly modified and we can learn a lot from looking at them. I was reminded of this just this morning walking into town when I noticed an arch in the pub at Mount Radford in Exeter.

As many of you know I have been working with some precasters in New Zealand on developing modern arch bridges for the market there. One issue that is always raised is earthquakes. Usually on
the lines of “we can’t build those, they will just rattle down in a ‘quake.” Well they don’t. There are good reasons why they don’t. I knew there were a few arches in Christchurch, but the only way to find out how they fared in 2009 is to go and look and back in
November I finally got the chance.

So, what are we looking at this month? Well essentially at some of the side issues and lessons learned from the bridge lift.

Back to Moco Farm and the real lift. So, what is involved in lifting an arch? The first task for me was to dispel misconceptions. The biggest of which is the all too common statement that Arch bridges are brittle. That is JUST NOT TRUE yet I see it and hear it so often.

This month, really, nothing else will do. On 18th and 26th October, we picked up the arch of this bridge by 900mm (Yes, three feet in old money) then set it back down to 435mm to build it in an exact number of courses above its original position.

The Old Bridge at Stirling is a wonderful thing. Only well through the 19thC was there a bridge over the Forth downstream of here. I had a collection of photos taken some years ago but they were slides and lost in a “library” of same so the opportunity to visit in July was very welcome. It is variously dated to 15thC or 16thC, though there were a number of timber predecessors including the one where Wm Wallace beat Edward 1st in 1297.

I have long wanted to visit this, though I knew far too little about it. A conference of bridge historians gave me an opportunity, and what an opportunity! This magnificent bridge, even from a distance, needs a modern camera with sweep panorama capability to capture most of it. There are several more spans to the right hidden over land these days. The river is, of course, the Vltava, immortalised by Smetena as Ma Vlast.

Pisek is the oldest bridge in the Czech Republic, probably late C13th, though like any old structure it has seen many rounds of repair. The most recent serious damage was 2002 and a board alongside told that story.
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This bridge in Kirby Lonsdale is magnificent. The main spans around 17m and about a third of a circle. I didn’t get chance to measure but that is perhaps a 32ft or 32ft6 radius. A prominent feature is the break in the parapets which looks almost like the sort of lip you get in Google earth stitched pictures.