Crossing into another world: the mysteries of a great bridge

I was not bad as a long-distance runner, wiry and slight. Running suited me because of its solitude, and because of the way I could feel my heart beating in time with the rhythm of my feet, my lungs heaving in my chest even as my mind grew ever more airy and light.

From the hilltop behind my childhood home it was possible to see the topmost spires of the Forth Road Bridge, its towers painted the grey of doves’ wings, and also of battleships. A Sunday afternoon’s outing might be to take a walk over the bridge and back. If you close your ears to the traffic but open your eyes to the landscape, it’s a walk to expand your mind as well as your vision.

A suspension bridge in the grand San Francisco style, it’s an estuary-wide handfast of concrete and steel. Two immense towers more than a kilometre apart suspend twin garlands of cables that hang in graceful parabolas, like playmates swinging a couple of skipping ropes. Each cable is over half a metre thick, spun from 12,000 high-tensile wires and bearing 14,000 tonnes of weight – you could hang the Statue of Liberty off them, or three Eiffel Towers.

Two a half kilometres long, flanked by walkways and cycleways, with handrails like an ocean liner, it is fortified by gantries of trussed cross-beams to prevent it flexing in high winds. It was opened in September 1964 by Queen Elizabeth as the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night dropped to number 10 in the charts, and the Kinks’ You Really Got Me reached number 1. Its designers boasted that it would last 120 years, but the burden of traffic it has been obliged to bear has meant it needed reinforcement long before that. On that day in 1964 the Queen was driven north over the bridge, then sailed back again by ferry – the final passenger of a service that had been running for nine centuries. Three men died in the bridge’s construction; several were saved by safety nets strung beneath decks. If you fell through those nets, it was a drop of 160 feet to the sea.

The bridge was astonishing in its day for the elegance of its slender towers, which had to be built in five sections. Its north tower was built first, 156 metres tall; it swayed even in light winds before a dampening system was laid into it. The anchors for each cable are buried 80 metres deep into the bedrock of both shores. Those hidden anchors confer the strength necessary for the openness and connectedness of the bridge – an apt metaphor for all those unseen footings that our connections rely upon. The spinning of wire for its cables began in 1961 but was delayed by winter gales that year, which folded them in knots so tangled they had to be cut out. The decks of the bridge hang from its principal cables in 20- or 30-metre segments; metalled gaps between each segment allow for heat expansion in the summer. Cars driving over the bridge make a percussive rhythm as their wheels rumble over these metalled gaps, as if the bridge itself has a heartbeat and comes alive through the motion of those who cross it. Like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and the Pont Neuf in Paris, the crown of the bridge is a renowned spot for suicides, but also for declarations of love: fixed there are grids of steel wire festooned with padlocks, each marked with hearts and the initials of lovers. It’s a relatively new tradition, one thought to have started in Rome only within the last 20 years or so, underlining the way that the meanings we ascribe to bridges are always evolving.

About 30,000 years ago the land on either side of the Forth estuary became entombed beneath the great northern European ice sheet. Fifteen thousand years later that ice retreated back towards the Arctic, unburdening the land, which began to ripple in geologically slow relief. Sometimes the earth would sink for a few thousand years, so that an inundation of the sea reached across almost as far as Glasgow (skeletons of stranded blue whales have been uncovered in the sediments west of Stirling). Sometimes it would rise for a few thousand years, to leave a series of raised beaches along the outer coasts. For long stretches of this time Britain wasn’t an island, and much of the water we now have to bridge was still locked up in ice. Give or take a couple of river crossings, for those millennia you could have walked from London to Brussels with dry feet.

Almost 2,000 years ago the Romans pushed the frontiers of their empire as far north as the Forth river, which they called Bodotria. (Its equivalent frontier, at the other end of the empire, was the Euphrates.) This was their land under Ursa Major, the sign of the Great Bear – what the Greeks had called arktikos (the bear). It was with a strange sense of pride but also of alienation that I realised I had grown up in a place that for those Mediterranean explorers was the Arctic.

(Image: Forth Road Bridge)

I have lived along the shores of the Forth for most of my life, but only once have I seen the aurora borealis flicker over its waters – a great arch of green light in the north, enveloped in darkness like an emerald ring tucked into the plush velvet of a jeweller’s box. The Roman sentries who garrisoned this frontier of empire must have seen many such auroras, lights that for Scandinavians further north would become the bridge Bifrost, over which the gods could travel between heaven and earth. Later, medieval cartographers looked across the gulf of the Forth and called the region to its north Scocia Ultramarina – Scotland-beyond-the-Sea. Not a great deal is known about the Forth in the centuries after those Roman colonisers left. In the 11th century a Hungarian-born refugee princess called Margaret married a king of Scots and in 1071 established a ferry for pilgrims across the waters. That ferry was the forerunner of the three bridges that span the river today.

The settlements established on either side of Queen Margaret’s ferry became North Queensferry and South Queensferry. An 800 -year-old friary – the replacement for a much older wooden church – still stands by the old point of departure on the south side. It is even now in use, its paved floor sunk five feet below street level, its vaulted ceiling like an upturned clinkered hull. On the beach outside, children fish for crabs and tiddlers between rock sills that stood centuries’ service as pilgrims’ wharves. The medieval abbot of the priory was a kind of bridgemaster, determining who could cross and who would be denied.

As commerce, traffic and industry took the place of devotion, purpose-built piers were erected further east in the expanding town of Queensferry. In the late 18th century the Hawes Inn was constructed at the head of one of them. Sir Walter Scott wrote fondly of it in The Antiquary (“Well! we shall be pretty comfortable at the Hawes ... it will be pleasanter sailing with the tide of ebb and the evening breeze”), and Robert Louis Stevenson too, in Kidnapped (“There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine – in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide.”)

The oar- and wind-powered ferries Scott knew gave way to the coal and steam of Stevenson’s day, which ceded in their turn to diesel. But the demand for those ferries relentlessly outstripped their capacity. The obvious solution – a tunnel – has been perennially proposed, and perennially ruled out: the rocks beneath the firth are lava-forged and too difficult to excavate, overlaid with many layers of glacial tills and silt. That said, there is a tunnel under the Forth further upstream, a service tunnel that once connected two collieries, wide enough only for a trolley of coal. But the river didn’t suffer long to be crossed that way: after a few decades of being propped up, scooped out and pumped dry, in the late 20th century the tunnel was abandoned to be drowned.

(Image: The Bridge Between Worlds)

To cross any strait or watercourse, either by boat or by ford, has always been a risky activity, and was once much more so. Charon, ferryman of the Styx, demanded payment for access to the afterlife and to the bliss of forgetting; without that payment, the souls of the dead were trapped on the wrong side of the divide as ghosts, haunted by memories of their lives’ misdeeds. In some ages and some cultures bridges have been seen as horizontal crossings to another world; in others, the crossing is vertical, with death coming as a fall from the precarious bridge of life. For Nietzsche, “what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWNGOING”. As with death, birth too is a risky crossing between worlds, and the umbilical cord a life-giving bridge between mother and baby. To confront the risks of river crossings, my own country developed a complex mythology of water spirits – kelpies – that were to be appeased or avoided by travellers. Kelpie stories flourished until the military bridges of the 18th century made such myths unnecessary. Flowing waters have long been considered symbolic of the turbulence of life, and bridges, like ferries, emblematic of passage between its stages. As a child reading my Ladybird books I marvelled at the power and possibilities of bridges, and even dreamed of living on one. As I get older I realise how much each of us lives by them.

Little remains to me now of that day running back and forth over the bridge at the age of 12: a few flashing images of hot, exhilarating hours as I clocked up first ten, then 20, then 30 kilometres back and forth between Lothian and Fife, Fife and Lothian. From the crown of the arch of the bridge the view was almost Olympian, and on that run I felt less earthbound than skybound. It seems to me now that I was running from the past into the future, from childhood into adolescence.

This is an extract from The Bridge Between Worlds by Gavin Francis which is published on September 12th. Gavin will be speaking at events in September with Portobello Books and Topping in Edinburgh, and at Topping St Andrews.