Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Highlands and Islands
Date 2007
Event ID 930333
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/930333
Ferness Bridge
Historic Engineering Works no. HEW 0320
This bridge, built under the direction of the Highland Roads & Bridges Commission and now carrying the A939 road over the Findhorn, was designed by Telford and completed in 1816. The contractor was George Burn. It has three segmental arch granite masonry spans of 36 ft, 55 ft
and 36 ft and is similar in construction to its contemporaries at Alford and Potarch in Aberdeenshire.
During the great flood of 1829, when the water level rose 27 ft above normal, the bridge was severely tested. A fine ash tree with a triple stem, the largest being 1212 ft in circumference, was brought down and after rising 40 ft or 50 ft above the water sunk into the vortex at the main arch
stem first where ‘for three or four minutes it stuck groaning and bellowing as if from torture and then appeared darting below the lower side of the bridge shorn of its mighty honours’. The only damage to the bridge was ‘the loss of a part of its southern wing walls and roadway estimated
at about £100’.
R Paxton and J Shipway, 2007.
Reproduced from 'Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Highlands and Islands' with kind permission from Thomas Telford Publishers.
