Down Memory Lane by Bill McAllister: Confusion and climbing costs hit work to replace the old Ness bridge swept away in the great flood in Inverness in 1849
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Confusion, criticism and climbing costs meant the wait for a new bridge replacing the one swept away in Inverness’s Great Flood of January 25, 1849 would drag on for six and a half years.
The government originally offered to contribute £8000, then sent engineer James Rendel north and in July, 1850 he suggested three sites for a crossing.
One was opposite Wells Street, close to today’s Friars Bridge, with another at Fraser Street, on whose corner the Mustard Seed restaurant now stands.
But Rendel’s final choice was the site of the collapsed bridge – although his plan for a box girder iron bridge, at £16,000, was controversial.
By November final plans for the girder structure rose to £20,000 with a suspension option £2000 cheaper.
The suspension bridge was chosen, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer making a funding offer accepted early in 1851.
Site clearance work began in March 1852. In June, contractor Thomas Hutchings began work – only for his company to cease trading in October.
Not one pillar of the bridge finished in five years
In February, 1853 a firm called Hendrie was engaged, but by the following January it too had gone bust.
The Courier of January 26, 1854 reported a magistrate as saying: “Five years have now gone by and not one pillar of this bridge is finished yet; no, nor half a pillar”.
In March, 1854 a company owned by a Mr Leather was engaged by Rendel on a “third time lucky” basis and leased the quarries of Redcastle and Tarradale to provide stone.
Rendel reported that £8959 had already been spent, with £9440 remaining of the Parliamentary grant and Treasury loan.
But he revealed income of £1150 as forfeited security from the original contractor plus stock and plant valued at £1400 forfeited by Hendrie’s firm, judged sufficient to finish the task.
The new contractor was three months on site when 20 masons went on strike. Paid a guinea a week they wanted three shillings more.
That October Rendel blamed one cause of the delay on broken pilings due to being “misled by a report on the nature of the foundations”.
An angry Joseph Mitchell, the local engineer, responded: “The delays and great expense have arisen from acting in defiance of the information furnished.”
His view was the hard mountain clay would render piles unnecessary but the contractor had burrowed into the “almost impenetrable” clay, breaking and destroying the pilings.
Bridge seems 'doomed to misfortune or mismanagement'
Leather’s men finally began to make significant progress in 1855 before work stopped again in July “for want of wooden blocks to finish the roadway”.
The Courier stated:”Every step with regard to this bridge seems doomed to misfortune or mismanagement”.
But on August 23 the newspaper reported the bridge was open: “Carriages and foot passengers have today for the first time had a free passage across it.
Now that the bridge is all but finished, we must do it justice to say it is by far the finest construction of the kind in the North of Scotland.
“The span is 225 feet and the solidity and finish of the work are spoken of by all competent judges as unequalled in the Highlands and unsurpassed anywhere”.
The bridge would do its job for over a century – but from the 1930s it attracted mounting criticism and unpopularity for traffic queues.
It closed in 1959 and the current Ness Bridge opened two years later.
A relic of the flood-wrecked bridge is on the town house’s west wall, a panel dated 1686, with the burgh’s old coat of arms.
Sponsored by Ness Castle Lodges.
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