this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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I've been to this bridge. It's the Devil's Bridge in Wales.
Here's another angle, ripped from Wikipedia:
The river underneath is insanely deep. Pictures do not do it justice just how much further it goes out of the bottom of this frame. You do not get out of there. That is death.
The bottom-most bridge was built around the 12th century. How the hell they managed to build stuff like this way back then staggers me.
That's when you just say frick it and caulk the wagon.
If you're trying to get from Missouri to Oregon and you end up in Wales then you've got bigger problems.
Somewhere Christopher Columbus^*^ shifted uncomfortably in his seat
^*^Obligatory frick Christopher Columbus
I find it hard to relate with this sentence. That's just 3 bridges on the top of what seems like a natural rock formation, right? With 2 being arches and the top one being a modern-ish structure.
No matter how deep it is, it's narrow enough to just move a prebuild wooden foot bridge used for people to go around constructing the thing.
90m, that is deep.
Duh, the Devil helpedz it's in the name.
You may joke, but that's actually part of the legend of the bridge!
The legend goes that a woman saw her cow grazing on the opposite side of the river.
To get it back, the devil offered to build a bridge in exchange for a living soul.
The woman threw a piece of bread across the new bridge and her dog went to eat it. The devil got the dog's soul 👍
Poor dog
While we're talking about Devil's Bridges, Hamburg has one, too: It was built to make crossing the devil's ford easier, so called because there were so many accidents there people couldn't explain it otherwise. A carpenter was contracted, who is said to have made a pact with the devil, that the bridge may stay, at the price of the soul of the first living thing to cross the bridge. On inauguration day, then, the local reverend blessed the bridge and set off to cross it, when out of the bushes a rabbit appeared and sprinted across the bridge. A statute memorialises the occasion:
...the less exciting explanation is that back when Holstein was still under Danish rule there were two bridges close together, and the double bridge then turned into the devil's one. dövelt -> Düvel in Low Saxon makes a lot of sense but is boring.
They really should continue the tradition by building a fourth bridge over the current one when the time comes.
That's why they stopped at three. The fourth bridge always takes forever to paint.
This deserves many more upvotes than you've had. I guess most people here just don't get the reference.
They really needed to pass that river.
Clearly a cousin of The Strid. Except the Strid is usually full to the brim and you can't see the literal death walls that lie beneath the surface.
Tom Scott made a video about it during his many adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8
Labor was free because of slavery, so the economics were not the same. Current engineering has the concept of "over engineering" which is what cracked-up addicts in wall street call "building to last", due to the "expense" of not being shortsighted on a quarter by quarter basis.
Actually overenginnering is the thing with pre-modern structures, like the bottom bridge here. Survivorship bias played a role, where things they don't build to last, evidently don't last to this day, but mostly it's because they don't really understand the math behind all of it so they take the most conservative and the tried and tested rules of thumb when doing big structures. This is why big projects back then can take decades to complete.
In the modern day, we design specifically to balance durability and cost, and we are confident of our maths and understanding of material science to use the least amount that does the work for the design life that we choose.
Good thing that's not a problem anymore.
From my pov I think you're repeating exactly what I said, but I appreciate the additional details.
My last point is that "the design life we choose" is usually dictated by non-engineering forces. A 12th century king can throw resources at a problem. A 20th century governor cannot, and doesn't care to. They care about the bridge lasting until the end of their term limits.
Was it slaves? I am not seeing any references to slaves building the original bridge online anywhere, where did you see that? :o
I think it's just an assumption based on the mode of society at that time in history. If it was built in the 12th century it was built by what we would now consider slaves. In the 1100s the land was divided into fiefs and the lord of that land considered the people who lived and worked on the land as part of that land: serfs. Unless this bridge was an exception to the rule, then serfs would have undertaken all the labour that got it built.
Slaves nowadays usually refers to either American-style chattel slavery or Roman-style slavery, both of which were systems much different than Serfdom.
But yes serfs will likely have built it, or were involved with the build under direction of hired stone masons, on order of a noble and with resources a noble paid for, under the general societal rule that serfs were to spend a certain amount of days a year working on infrastructure stuff as part of their taxes. For more details you'd have to dig into the law at that time at that particular place but those kinds of arrangements were incredibly common in Europe in the middle ages. You tended to be able to buy yourself out of having to work, and also pay your way in silver or gold out of paying in grain, livestock, etc.
Yeppers that's the thought process. thanks for explaining better than me.
I'm considering most economic systems prior to...the last few centuries to be essentially slavery. If some random king owns everything....
Not the same as America's slavery of course, nor is it necessarily legally structured slavery as existed in many societies, but nevertheless.