Visit Forth Bridge Scotland

In the mid 19th century as the railway spread across Scotland, it reached the Firth of Forth, where it was forced to a halt by an expanse of water over a mile wide that seemed to be impassable. But an engineer, Thomas Bouch, persuaded his employers, the North British Railway, that his dream of spanning the Forth and the Tay estuaries could become a reality. By 1879 Bouch had completed the Tay Bridge and the foundations of the Forth Bridge were under way. Then, four days after Christmas, the new Tay Bridge collapsed, pitching an Edinburgh train and 79 souls into the icy water.

The disaster ruined Bouch, who was blamed for the calamity, and work on the Forth Bridge was halted. Incredibly, given prevailing public opinion, the directors soon began searching for designers to finish the project. They accepted a design by Sir John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, who, among other projects, had been responsible for much of the work on London's underground railway system.

In a bold move Bouch's traditional suspension bridge was swept aside in favour of a revolutionary cantilever design, based on bridges popular in the Far East for centuries, but never before tried on such a scale. Gradually the massive structure took shape. The most hazardous task, Baker believed, would be the sinking of the huge cylindrical piers to the sea bed, which involved men digging out hundreds of tons of spoil from beneath them.

In the event, not one life was lost below the piers, but 57 men died as the superstructure grew over 360ft into the sky. Certainly work at this height involved considerable danger, but Baker and his supervisors were convinced that many of these men would have lived had it not been for the whisky of the Hawes Inn, which, fortunately for the owner, stood near the site.

Finally, on 4 March 1890, following extensive tests, the Prince of Wales hammered home the last of the six-and-a-half million rivets, and declared the bridge open. Many fondly believe that there is a gang of painters who start work at one end of the bridge, paint to the other end and then begin again. Painting the 145 acres of steelwork accounts for much of the maintenance budget, but is just one of the many jobs carried out by engineers to ensure the safety of the bridge.

The Board of Trade Inspectors, charged with inspecting the work, said on its completion: This great undertaking, every part of which we have seen at different stages of its construction, is a wonderful example of thoroughly good workmanship, with excellent materials, and both in its conception and execution is a credit to all who have been connected with it. It is a great tribute to Fowler and Baker that, even in today's technologically advanced age, it would be hard to find an engineer who would disagree.

When the Forth Bridge opened on 4 March 1890, it was the longest railway bridge in the world and the first large structure made of steel. Crossing the wide Firth of Forth west of Edinburgh in Scotland, it represents one of the greatest engineering triumphs of Victorian Britain, man's victory over the intractable topography of land and water. Not surprisingly, such a vigorous rebuff of the natural order was condemned at the time by those late Victorians who resisted the march of technology, and William Morris described the Bridge as the supremest specimen of all ugliness. In response, Benjamin Baker insisted that its beauty lay in its functional elegance. Contrasting the bridge with the only comparable structure of the period, the Eiffel Tower, he concluded: The Eiffel Tower is a foolish piece of work, ugly, ill-proportioned and of no real use to anyone. But the beauty and fascination of the Forth Bridge lies not simply in its functional performance, but in its scale and power. Over a mile long and higher than the dome of St. Peter's in Rome, it rivals the natural phenomena that the philosophers of the 18th century identified as sources of sublime beauty. Immanuel Kant pointed to hurricanes, boundless oceans and high waterfalls as objects of sublime contemplation, "because they raise the forces of the soul above the heights of the vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature". In the 19th century the awe-inspiring feats of nature were rivaled by the inventions of the engineers, and the thrill of the waterfall or the lightning flash was eclipsed by the sight of the roaring locomotive dashing across the majestic span of the Forth Bridge. John Fowler, Benjamin Baker: Forth Bridge (Opus 18). Visit Scotland on the Best Scottish Tours.