DESECRATION OF OLD BRIDGES, 225 _et seq._, 230-6;
see also “Highway Boards.”
DEVIL’S BRIDGES, 66, 67, 70, 170, 184, 296. Many other bridges
have been attributed to the devil. In plate 58 of the treatise
by Hann and Hosking, you will find the Devil’s Bridge over the
Serchio near Lucca; there is also a very interesting account of
it, p. cxxxv. It is a gabled bridge with one big arch and four
smaller ones. The span of the big arch is 120 feet, and its
height above low-water level is more than 60 feet. The roadway
is very narrow, being only 9 feet wide, and it turns abruptly at
the wings, as if to close the entrances against wheeled traffic.
The quoins of the smaller arches and all the voussoirs of the
wide arch are of dressed stone. Every other part of the bridge
is rubble masonry bound together with most excellent mortar. The
courses of stone in the wide arch vary from 8 inches to 21
inches deep, but only a few have the latter depth. Yet this
slight bridge, which is nothing more than a broad arcaded wall,
has withstood many centuries of floods. On October 2nd, 1836,
for example, a head of water more than 30 feet deep swept
roaring through the five round arches and against the four piers
at the rate of 8 miles an hour; yet no harm was done. If this
bridge was built about the year 1000 A.D., as Hann and Hosking
say, it is somewhat older than the controversial date of Albi
Bridge.
DEVORGILLA’S BRIDGE at Dumfries, 94.
DIABLE, PONT DU, St. Gotthard Pass, 67.
DIARBEKR, on the Tigris, a Roman bridge at, 202.
DION CASSIUS, on Trajan’s bridge over the Danube, built before A.D.
106 by Apollodorus of Damascus, 129, 130.
DISMANTLING OLD LONDON BRIDGE, 219, 220.
DIVERTING THE THAMES from his bed when the old bridge was built, 253,
254.
DOGS, offered as sacrifices to the evil spirits of rivers, 69.
DON ANTONIO DE ULLOA (1716-95), on the tree-bridges of South
America, 135;
on a Peruvian suspension bridge called the Tarabita, 146;
on Capac Yupanqui’s bridge of rushes, 146-7;
on large bujuco bridges, 147.
DONCASTER BRIDGE had a chapel on it, 231.
DOUBLE AND TRIPLE RINGS OF VOUSSOIRS, 305 _footnote_.
DRAGON, its use in the decorative art of Chinese bridges, 126.
DRAWBRIDGE, one arch of mediæval bridges was often a drawbridge, 260.
DROITWICH, and its very curious chapelled bridge, now destroyed, 231.
DRYOPITHECUS, 113-14.
DUNSTAN, SAINT, Archbishop of Canterbury, _b._ 924--_d._ 988, from
his time the Mediæval Church regarded the building and upkeep
of bridges as a work of pious charity, 207.
DURDLE DOOR, on the coast at Lulworth, a natural archway, 151.
DURHAM BRIDGES, 96, 97, 205, 231.
DUTCH, THE, of the seventeenth century wished to bury a living child
under the foundations of a dam, 69.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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