number) which they bisect, as twenty feet span and fifteen feet high,
separated by piers eleven feet thick. There is thus a triple promenade
on this remarkable bridge--the vaulted passage below, the roadway and
lateral galleries above, and the open footpath at the top of all. I
should add that the upper part of the bridge is of brick, the piers and
towers are of stone.”[118]
There is no European structure akin to this, but for a long time
Rothenburg on the Tauber has been famous for a two-storeyed bridge;
also we know that some modern commercial bridges have an upper road and
a lower one, like the High Level Bridge at Newcastle. In every case
the idea was suggested by the Roman practice of building aqueducts in
tiers.
IV
And now let us give all our attention to the more military bridges.
Brangwyn has studied them with the utmost care and interest; there
are but few variations of the war-bridge that his art has not yet
represented. Let us see, then, what his research has found.
1. This bridge from Bhutan has the same technique as the cantilever
bridges of Kurdistan (p. 74); but the gateway towers mark an advance.
They are militant works, partly because they control the traffic, and
partly because they are open below the eaves for archery and for other
defensive warfare. Brangwyn suggests that gateway towers of this kind
may have been brought to India by Darius Hystaspes (512 B.C.) or by
Alexander the Great (327 B.C.). On this point there is no evidence. On
the other hand, there seems to be no doubt that the timber gateways on
Roman bridges in England, as in Gaul, were prepared for defence, though
their main use was to limit the freedom of a public thoroughfare,
invariably after sunset, and during the day in times of unrest. This
was the first aim of defensive bridges, so the gateway towers in Bhutan
are suggestive things to study. They are too light in structure to give
us an idea of the bold and stern gateways built by the Romans with
newly-felled trees; but yet they help us to realise vaguely what every
young civilization must have done when it learnt from a free use of
bridges that foes as well as friends were eager to pass without danger
across rivers.
[Illustration: PRIMITIVE TIMBER BRIDGE IN BHUTAN, INDIA]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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