Several specimens also remain of bridges with the triangular recesses we have mentioned, left on the top of the piers for the safety of foot passengers. Among many other examples may be quoted the beautiful fourteenth-century bridge at Warkworth, Northumberland,[58] which also deserves notice for another characteristic much more rarely to be met with, that is, the preservation of the tower built at one end for its defence. Most of the bridges of any importance were protected in this way, which, as the country became quieter, was found useless; the consideration that they were ornamental rarely sufficed to prevent their being pulled down. Those at Chester were removed in 1782–1784; those at York were demolished with the bridge itself, of the thirteenth century, at the beginning of the nineteenth; the Durham one, built on Framwellgate Bridge, in 1760; the beautiful fortified entrance to one of the two bridges at Shrewsbury disappeared in the same century, as well as the whole structure, with the picturesque old houses it bore. It must be conceded that those towers were sometimes very inconvenient. A witness of the fact told me that, quite recently, a gipsy’s caravan was stopped at the tower on Warkworth Bridge, being unable to pass under it owing to the lowness of the arch. The pavement had to be hollowed out to allow of the caravan’s proceeding on its way.
The best example of a defensive tower is the machicolated one at Monmouth, on the Monnow Bridge; except for the opening of passages to be used by people on foot, the fortified gate looks as it did in the Middle {74} Ages. The bridge itself, familiar to the Monmouth-born “Prince Hal” of Shakespeare, and of England, has, been, however, widened, as at Wakefield and elsewhere. The ribs of the ancient arches are still visible within the modern ones.
In Elizabethan times defensive towers for bridges continued to be built, but in poetry only. Spenser raised, in his lines, a beautiful structure, of Doric style, as befitted the Renaissance days in which he lived, at the entrance to the island of Venus:
It was a bridge ybuilt in goodly wize,
With curious corbes and pendants graven faire,
And arched all with porches, did arize
On stately pillours, fram’d after the Doricke guize.
And for defence thereof, on th’ other end
There reared was a castle faire and strong,
That warded all which in and out did wend,