Saturday, February 20, 2010

Great Britain: Town Path Bridge in Salisbury

Salisbury is at the confluence of five rivers in the southeast corner of Wiltshire County (about 70 miles west of London). It's an amazingly green place with a number of interesting bridges.

The Town Path Bridge is a continuous three span timber structure on masonry abutments and trapezoidal concrete piers. The two timber beams of the superstructure are haunched with short end spans and a long center span over the River Nadder. They look like 100 ft long glulam beams that were treated to survive the wet environment. I wonder how they were able to transport such long elements to the bridge site? The beams support five foot high timber handrails and a timber deck.

Although I couldn't find much information on the bridge, I would guess that it is about 30 years old. Its on the path between Harnham and Salisbury that goes through a large pasture filled with sheep. I think this is a very handsome footbridge that blends in well with the heavily wooded site.
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Great Britain: Town Path Bridge in Salisbury by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi

From memory the bridge was rebuilt, ~35 years ago.

I think the main timbers are in two sections, joined in the middle with an overlap joint and were delivered by low-loader and placed with a small crane.

The previous bridge was a similar design but had far lower handrails, about half the height. I believe the old bridge used the same concrete piers and brick abutments, although the abutments were partially dismantled and rebuilt.