A stone arch, highly skewed and cut on the “French” pattern.

South bridge is just one span of a viaduct which is only exposed where it crosses the Cowgate. There is a central arch which is presumably original, with a matching strip on one side and a rather different section added at the other. Lots of cracks and movement to explore.

I had no idea there were two Alcantaras. al-QanTarah (القنطرة) means "the bridge", says Wikipedia, which explains that. Many more then I guess but these both cross the Tagus. The other is more famous, possibly for good reason but this was well worth a visit.

I find Edinburgh endlessly fascinating. When I lived in Dundee it was a place for an excursion. From Exeter it is a rather harder journey, but I was there for a Future of Design Conference in April and took the chance to look again at the bridges over Cowgate, south of the old High Street. I did some work on South Bridge back in the early 90s and that will (probably) feature next month. It has 17 spans. How many spans there really are in George IV Bridge I don’t know but it is, in any case, a very different bridge.

People often ask whether I will ever run out of bridges. My answer is a confident no and April provided ample confirmation. In the course of one weekend I visited, revisted, or happened upon eight bridges worthy of photography and a note. I will begin with Pease, setting aside a longish queue that had already formed and risking losing track of them.

Here is something I have known about for years, probably 30 years, and never quite got back to. On the Southdown road south out of Harpenden is a magnificent bridge. The embankment is high so
there is plenty of room, but the railway crosses the road at 65 degrees.

Whilst spending time with my daughter in New Zealand, it occurred to me that I should look for an arch nearby. There are very few in New Zealand but Google tuned up this, probably the oldest stone bridge in New Zealand, which surely means the oldest bridge because the others would have been timber and would long
have rotted out.

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.