As to the bridge at Espalion, it has four unequal arches, and three of them are pointed, more or less. Their form is experimental, and seems to mark a first experiment in pointed Gothic. One arch, indeed, when looked at from underneath, might be an ill-planned Roman arch, so poor is its “ogival” or pointed shape; but yet the bridge, as the Brangwyn sketch bears witness, shows how an effort was made to free craftsmen from the convention of semicircular vaults. If we connect it with the age of Charlemagne we may argue thus: “Perhaps the masons were among those who at times restored a neglected Roman bridge; and perhaps the bridgemaster had gained some knowledge of Eastern arches, either at first-hand or from travellers or from drawings. East and West were united then as they were in much earlier times, so that information from each must have been conveyed to the other.” On the other hand, if we guess that the first bridge at Espalion was rebuilt in the twelfth century or in the thirteenth, then we must say also that the town of Espalion was too lazy even to seek advice from the Pontist Friars. Larousse has set forth the position very well: “The most ancient of the extant bridges, constructed in mediæval France, appears to be the one at Espalion (A.D. 780); its date is contested because we find it associated with the pointed arch; but this arch already had been used for two centuries in the East.”[27] So we may conclude, in a conjecture perhaps strong enough to be called a hypothesis, that the pointed style in architecture may have been brought to France on three occasions: in the reign of Charlemagne, then in the first half of the eleventh century, and then after the first Crusade. There is no need to set much store by the second presumed inspiration, since the idea for Albi Bridge may have been taken from the Pont du Tarn at Espalion. England as well as France has a controversy over arches; and I mention the fact because of Brangwyn’s masterly pen-drawing of the Monnow Bridge at Monmouth--a fortified work of the Middle Ages. In this bridge the arches are ribbed, like those in the bridges at Kirkby Lonsdale, and Warkworth, and Rotherham, at Baslow and Bakewell, in Eamont Bridge at Penrith, at Ross in Herefordshire (Elizabethan), and elsewhere. When was the ribbed arch first used in bridges?