What it Looks Like Today:Bampton to Holmingham Farm and 6 Bridges
Bridge 4a
Click on the buttons to switch between how it used to look and how it looks today
I have split this bridge up into parts and one for each side of the river.
As you walk along the raised bank,the stone ruins of the bridge come into view.It looked to me just like Roman ruins that I have seen before,not a railway bridge that was in use only 52 years ago.The bridge used to be one of those iron girder bridges that were quite common on the railways and it looks as though they simply removed the iron bits and just left the two stone ends.
I thought it was nice how an archway had been built into the design,to allow the farmer to move his sheep either side of the track and I wondered if that had been done at the expense of the farmer or the GWR.
Looking around,there was some pieces of stonework on the ground and I even found a piece of old telegraph insulator.In the old days,running next to the railway,there used to be a network of wires for sending telegraph messages.If you look at the old postcard at the top of this page and you look just to the left of the carriage,you will see one of the old telegraph posts and if you look even closer at the two dots on either side of the post you will see the ceramic insulators.
I also found another one of those fence posts made out of rail track,but this one had an inscription on it.Looking into the river I noticed that there was some stonework in the river.It probably fell there when they removed the iron girders.Looking across the river you can see the other end of the bridge .I was quite surprised that they hadn't built the bridge at 90 degrees to the bank i.e.the shortest distance,but instead built it at the longer diagonal.Lets have a look at it.