Another Roman road left Nîmes in the direction of Larzac, and near Lodève apparently it joined the ancient road from Saint-Thibéry to Millau; at Sommières it crossed the Vidourle by a magnificent Roman bridge which had no fewer than seventeen arches. To-day only eight arches are visible, the others having been buried under a great accumulation of soil on both banks.[69] Yet the Pont de Sommières, though deprived of nine arches, has a high place among the Roman monuments.
I have now to mention a Roman byway that branched out from the main road on the right bank of the Vidourle, at a little distance from Sommières; it ran toward Substantion, passing by Castries and joining the Via Domitiana near Vendargues. At Boisseron it crossed the river Bénovie, a small tributary of the Vidourle, by a bridge which to-day is extant, though disfigured by modern work. It has a shelving parapet and road, but we cannot describe it as a gabled bridge ([p. 27]). There are five arches of unequal size, the piers on the upstream side have cutwaters, and rectangular bays above the cutwaters ease the pressure of floods.
Frank Brangwyn has drawn for us the wreck of a Roman bridge over the Loire, at Brives-Charensac, in the neighbourhood of Puy; and the big arch, which springs from water-level, is particularly interesting because it has a double ring of voussoirs. The smaller arch belongs to the Middle Ages, for it has a pointed shape.
RUINS OF A ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE LOIRE AT BRIVES-CHARENSAC, FRANCE
We pass on to Spain, which has been called the land of bridges and aqueducts. A pontist may live there for many years and be happy all the time. Even a hurried author, who visits the antiquity of Spain as a mere journalist, and who mimics vainly the travel books of Alexandre Dumas, finds that the many bridges put some thoroughness into his own work, acting as a drag on the far-sought and dear-bought liveliness with which the million may be charmed. There is the case of S. R. Crockett, who was commissioned to be lively and daring among the Spaniards, so he published in 1903 “The Adventurer in Spain,” a poor copy both of Borrow and of Dumas. “I would like to write a book—copiously illustrated—upon Spanish bridges alone,” he told his readers in a moment of zeal, adding briskly, “that is, if I thought anybody could be found to buy it.” In one passage thought and enthusiasm very nearly broke loose from the discipline of “a popular style”:—
“Many bridges, too, there were—wonderful in a country where, as in Spain, there are neither roads to travel upon nor waters to cross—nor even, it may be added, travellers to cross them. Yet in our first hour we had passed, we five apprentice Carlists, at least as many admirable bridges—clean-shaped, practical, suited to the place and to the landscape as a becoming dress fits a pretty woman. This is a rare thing in bridges, and one which is almost never to be found in new countries, where a bridge is invariably an outrage upon the surrounding scenery. Queer bridges we found—triangular bridges, unnecessary bridges, of wood and stone and straw and stubble—but never ugly bridges.”
Mr. Crockett did not understand the rivers of Spain, many of which after a storm leap from their dry beds into raging torrents, and give rough-and-tumble lessons to bridge-builders. From Roman times to our own, these freakish waterways have inspired noble work, that cannot well be rated at too high a level. At Mérida alone a pontist can dream over the past for several months, not only studying the remains of three Roman aqueducts, upon which storks hold their parliaments, but making friends with two Roman bridges, one of which puts the Roman genius in scale with the Guadiana. It is a huge structure, not less than 780 metres in length, with sixty-four arches of granite. Books of reference mention eighty-one arches, but this number includes the relief bays for floods tunnelled through the piers above the cutwaters. Some writers believe that the greater bridge at Mérida was built under Trajan, while others give it to Augustus, who founded Mérida as a home of rest for the veteran soldiers of his last campaign. In 686 the Visigoths restored this bridge; in 1610 it was repaired by Philip III; in 1812, during the siege of Badajoz, seventeen of the arches were wrecked in order to close the river. At the northern end we find a Roman castle, now in ruins, so we are able to study a battle-bridge dating from those times when Rome turned wars into colonies.
The Roman bridges of Spain may be divided into five classes:—