A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

There! We have followed a superstition—a vile convention in ignorance and cowardice—from the Pons Sublicius in Ancient Rome to the Pont-y-Mynach in South Wales; and the best we can say of it is that in Pagan Rome it went from human victims to effigies of men and women, while in Christian times it passed from human victims to dogs.[19] Mr. Baring-Gould has told us that in bridges, and “in all such structures, a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place.” Yet it was not in a structure—a finished building—that Vortigern wished to offer his sacrifice; he “sought to lay the foundations of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy,” so his aim was to placate the Spirits of Evil before his castle was built. As to his conception of the spiritual agencies to be appeased, it would mingle his own passions with the fears bred by his primitive fanaticism. For, as Darwin says, “savages would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves felt.”

Now in the case of bridges we have to identify primitive men with the terror inspired by storms and floods; a terror difficult for us to understand in our sheltered lives. Have you read Matthew Paris, who lived in the reign of Henry III? If not, go to him and study the tempests that he described, and see how villages were desolated by winds and inundations. Amid these disasters the ignorant would cling to ancient superstitions; fear would be pagan out of doors whatever faith might say in church; and I have no doubt at all that the many so-called Devil’s Bridges were as supernatural to the mediæval peasant as were witches. The Dutch of the Middle Ages were more advanced in domestic civilization than our own ancestors; and yet at heart they were cruel pagans, even as late as the seventeenth century, as Mr. Baring-Gould has shown. How very humble human nature ought to be!

Let us pass on, then, to a convention that does not reek like a stricken field. One of the best historians in architecture, Viollet-le-Duc, found in the hills of Savoy a primeval bridge whose structure had been changed very little, if at all, since the days when its ancestors were described by Cæsar and used by the Gauls. It is a timber bridge, known in France as un empilage, a thing piled together rudely, and not constructed with art. Indeed, it needs no carpentry, so it is far behind the social genius of prehistoric lake-dwellers. To make a simple Gaulish bridge, as to-day in Savoy, we must choose a deep-lying river with rugged banks; then with water-worn boulders we make on each bank a rough foundation about fifteen feet square, or more. Upon this we raise a criss-cross of tree trunks, taking care that the horizontal trees jut out farther and farther across the water, narrowing the gap to be bridged by four or five pines. Each criss-cross must be “stiffened” or filled in with pebbles and bits of rock; and across the unfinished road of pines thick boards are nailed firmly. Viollet-le-Duc says:—

“Cette construction primitive ... rappelle singulièrement ces ouvrages Gaulois dont parle César, et qui se composaient de troncs d’arbres posés à l’angle droit par rangées, entre lesquelles on bloquait des quartiers de roches. Ce procédé, qui nest qu’un empilage, doit remonter à la plus haute antiquité; nous le signalons ici pour faire connaître comment certaines traditions se perpétuent à travers les siècles, malgré les perfectionnements apportés par la civilisation, et combien elles doivent toujours fixer l’attention de l’archéologue.”

Does anyone suppose that Savoy would have been loyal to a prehistoric bridge if all primitiveness had vanished from her social life?

Not that Savoy is the only place where criss-cross bridges are still in vogue. Much finer specimens are to be found in Kashmír, thrown across the river Jhelum, the Hydaspes of Greek historians. At Srínagar, the capital city, founded in the sixth century A.D., there is a quite wonderful example, for it has many spans, and corbelled out from the footway is a quaint little street of frail shops, rickety cabins with gabled roofs, and so unequal in size that they are charmed with an amusing inequality. I have several photographs of this bridge, and in them I see always with a renewed pleasure its ancestry, its descent from the prehistoric lake-villages, those heralds of Venice and of Old London Bridge ([p. 216]). All the piers are made with deodar logs piled up in the criss-cross manner; those that stretch across the river are cut in varying lengths, and each succeeding row is longer than the one beneath it, so the logs in a brace of piers project towards each other farther and farther over the water, till at last they form an arched shape; not an arch perfect in outline, of course, since the head of it is flattened by the long bearing beams of the roadway. Still, the arched shape is very noticeable.

A pontist should study these rude arches with care, and connect them with similar arches in the Gaulish bridges of Savoy, and also with the historic fact that the first arches built with voussoirs (i.e. arch-stones) were evolved from vaults roughly constructed with parallel courses of stone and layers of timber ([p. 155]). It is probable that the parallel layers of timber or rows of logs came before the parallel courses of stone, as the evolution of architecture passed from wood to stone. Forests much more than rocks and quarries have been an inspiration to primitive builders, as if the handling of wood has quickened in human nature an arboreal instinct dating from the family trees in the descent of man.

AT ALBI ON THE TARN, IN FRANCE, SHOWING ON OUR RIGHT
THE OLD HOUSES, AND ON OUR LEFT, BEYOND THE BRIDGE,
THE GREAT OLD CHURCH, FAMOUS FOR ITS FORTIFICATIONS