Dryburgh Bridge
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Dryburgh Suspension Bridge, near Dryburgh Abbey, Borders, Scotland, is a 19th century suspension bridge between the villages of Dryburgh and St. Boswells (part of a ribbon of settlements including Newtown St. Boswells), across the River Tweed. A crossing has existed here for centuries, originally with a ferry service, but the current structure is no more than a footbridge. It was erected in 1872 with a gift intended to allow the Dryburgh villagers to worship at the churches in St. Boswells and Newtown St. Boswells. It is a relatively simple design with only one suspended span.
The bridge, sometimes known as Dryburgh Abbey Bridge, that it replaced was of significant historical interest. It had been commissioned by David Stewart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, an eccentric Scottish aristocrat who later died in Dryburgh. It was a 79 metres long pedestrian cable-stayed bridge, a type of bridge that was undergoing a period of rapid growth in popularity. The Earl opened the completed bridge on August 1, 1817, but in January 1818 it collapsed. After a redesign a replacement was built, but this too collapsed in 1838, by which time the Earl had been dead for several years. Interestingly, very shortly after the original collapse (between 1819 and 1820) another bridge, the Union Bridge, was built further downstream. It was an iron suspension bridge, the longest in the world upon its completion.
The 1818 collapse, together with that of a slightly shorter bridge across the Saale River in Germany in 1824, caused the reputation of cable-stayed bridges to decline rapidly, and despite a history dating back to the 17th century, the design was almost completely abandoned for over a century, with suspension bridges gaining favour. Later research in the 1930s, and experience with reconstruction after the Second World War, demonstrated that with sound design, cable-stayed bridges are not without advantages, and the first modern design, the Strömsund Bridge in Sweden, was completed in 1955.
[edit] External links
- Tweed bridges
- Dryburgh Abbey Bridge in the Structurae database
- Collapse of the original bridge
- Entry for the 1818 bridge at Bridgemeister.com
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