Lynn Hughes on
Llandilo Bridge
1
Pons Asinorum: the building of Llandilo bridge. Lynn Hughes
'Pons Asinorum'
was first published in
Carmarthenshire Life (Nov/04) and is derived from a chapter of
Lynn Hughes's work in progress, Towy: The Biography of a River, to be
published.
Bridges are a necessity, and we take them for granted. Journeying west from Llandovery, gateway to the Towy Valley, on the A40 - the old Gloucester to Milford trunk road - twenty bridges will have been traversed on reaching Llandilo: and that is not counting culverts.
Llandilo Bridge 1998. GR.
Another twenty-five bridges lie ahead before arriving at Carmarthen. Forty five bridges in twenty-seven miles - we cross them without thinking. Not so very long ago, they would have required a lot of careful thought: for most of them were not there, and those that were, were not so very convenient.
Before 1750, only two major stone bridges spanned the Towy - one at Carmarthen of six arches, and another at Llandilo of seven arches; the ‘great bridge’ over the Cothi which Leland encountered in 1536 at the eponymous village, may also have been of stone: it is not certain. There was a bridge-crossing at Llandovery 'on and off', but the gravel substrate posed grave difficulties for generations of bridge-builders, and the town was notorious for its treacherous ford. The remaining bridges, wherever they could be found, were generally wooden and, as a tourist travelling through Carmarthenshire in 1775 complained,
'not only most inconveniently narrow but too few in number, for where a little bridge should be, you have a steep little paved channel across the road, excessively disagreeable to those who ride in carriages'.Equestrians could manage fords fairly well when river and stream levels were moderate to low - though many a horse slipped and tumbled his mount to a concussed and watery fate even in low water. Algael deposit formed in warm weather, fed by nutrients, so that ford-paving became lethal. A fatality occurred at College ford on the Cennen at Derwydd in June 1840 when a horse and rider fell. A minister had been thrown from his horse and killed at Johnstown in November, 1828. Treventy bridge, Llanarthne, was the scene of another such fatality in September, 1865.
For the pedestrian, too, fording was a potential hazard. In damp weather, stepping-stones and stone-slab ‘clapper’ bridges, wooden bridges or rope foot-bridges alike, became slippery. At Pontynyswen, a poor girl lost her footing on the wooden bridge and was drowned in the Cothi in August, 1839. In 1848, a Llangadog carrier crossing Ffrwdfelin ford in December saw a woman lose her footing on the little bridge and drown before he could help her. In rainy weather, when rivers and tributary streams were full and the current strong, you took your chances with your life, mounted or on foot. Throughout Celtic folklore bridges are deemed perilous.You could be lucky. A French tourist, AB dePenhouet, walking from Llangadog to Llandovery in the summer of 1795, encountered Welsh enterprise at a Carmarthenshire ford where
'... a little obstacle presented itself - a little river to cross - and no bridge. (Luckily) some Welch people came very civilly out of a neighbouring cottage and showed us the ford. Upon the shore was a Welch cart, of very economical construction, saving the expense of wheels, which they used for crossing the brook'.The Romans were not the first to build major bridges in Britain, but it was a science they sophisticated and brought with them. The Bronze Age people who built Stone Henge were skilled engineers, capable of large-scale bridge building. A massive oak bridge from the Bronze Age, 3500 years ago, was uncovered by the Thames Archaeological Survey in 1999 at a site two miles upstream from the later Roman bridge at Vauxhall - at the confluence of the river Effra with the Thames. The paired oak piles were 13' deep, and the bridge - at 30' wide - allowed two carts to pass.
Pons, the Latin technical term for bridge (bont in Welsh, pont in French), has the same root in most European Romance languages. In its three hundred-and-fifty-year regime in Carmarthenshire, the most formidable military machine in the world marched with a skilled cadre of surveyors and engineers, road and bridge builders whose determination was both strategic and defensive. Though famous for their ‘straight-line’ approach, the Romans too were careful to select the ‘driest’ routes between river-crossings, taking account of historic flood high-water levels, presumably gleaned from local knowledge and observation of old tracks and pathways. Where they met impeding rivers they emplaced temporary pontoon bridges on barges, later to be replaced by more permanent edifices.
1.
'A Welch Cart': ABL Maudet de Penhouet, A Tour through South Wales
[1795]
