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.

It is always fascinating to see how other people do things. This railway viaduct in Aachen Has had a great deal of work done on it by the Bahn.

A flying visit to a joke bridge to finish the year.

A visit to Nuremberg (otherwise Nuernberg) to examine the Fleischbruecke extended into a walk around of series of bridges old and new.

The bridge at Regensburg is old and long. It was good to get back there. There is a lot to be drawn from it and more yet to see if I ever get back.

I heard about the Kraemerbruecke some years ago. A lovely stone bridge with shops over just like the old London Bridge. Managed a visit in August and it has taken till Christmas to get it written up for here.

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.