18 February 2014, Starts: 19:30

‘From Wade to Williams: conservation of Highland bridges’
by Mark Watson (Historic Scotland)
Tuesday 18th February • Community Hall Annexe, Gairloch• 7:30pm

Organised by Gairloch Heritage Museum

Bridges played vital roles in the economic and political integration of the Highlands into Scotland, and remain as valuable today as when many were first built in the 18th-20th centuries.

The evolution of bridge types and the challenges that each present to users, admirers and modern road engineers, will be described through examples taken from mainland Scotland – Highland, Moray, Perthshire, Angus and Aberdeenshire and including;

• Clapper bridges in Wester Ross and timber bridges in Inverness-shire, now rare in a national context, repaired like Washington’s axe.

• Iron bridges: sleuthing in the glens for stayed bridges by John Justice (Dundee), the saga of the Dredge (of Bath) suspension bridges in Inverness-shire, and happy outcomes for iron railway bridges on the Speyside way and in Perthshire.

• The extraordinary forms taken by the concrete bridges of E Owen Williams that carry the old A9: to be repaired or concealed?

• Stone arched bridges: nuances between those of Wade, Caulfield and Telford, and what happens when found to be under-strength or lacking suitable parapets.

Mark Watson works in the Conservation Directorate of Historic Scotland and is presently preoccupied by the nomination of the Forth Bridge to the World Heritage List. He has previously been Historic Scotland’s Historic Buildings Inspector responsible for Highland Region, for four years, and elsewhere. He wrote the Managing Change guidance note on the conservation of engineering structures (2010) and A Guide to the Industrial Archaeology of Tayside (2013).