In connexion with his work on the Bridgewater Canal and on the road system of the Scottish Highlands, Telford designed and built innumerable bridges, the majority of them of stone. But some of his later iron bridges, more skilfully devised technically and more graceful visually than the Buildwas Bridge, deserve mention here. On the Waterloo Bridge of 1815 at Bettws-y-Coed in Wales he used an openwork inscriptional band and floral badges rather than architectural detail to give elegance and even richness to a modest cast-iron arch. A longer and simpler bridge of similar design but unknown authorship built in 1816 still spans the Liffey in Dublin. The same year as the Waterloo Bridge, at Craigellachie, amid austere Scottish mountains, Telford bridged the Spey with a plain latticed iron arch. But it is worth noting that he elaborated the masonry abutments as battlemented towers in a wholly Picturesque way (Plate 59). For the Menai Bridge, built in 1819-24 between North Wales and Anglesey, Telford used a new principle in metal construction, suspending his roadbed from metal chains (Plate 58B). This was a principle of great antiquity already exploited with success in America.[157] Telford’s masonry towers at the Menai Bridge are of extremely elegant Romantic Classical design, tapered like Egyptian pylons and pierced with delicate arches. In the twin bridge to this at Conway, also in North Wales, the close proximity of the Edwardian castle led him to provide Castellated towers. In a still later arched bridge at Tewkesbury of 1826 the latticed metalwork itself has the cuspings of Gothic tracery. The Menai Bridge remains the longest of its type in the British Isles. I. K. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, for which he won the competition in 1829, but which was begun only in 1837, has already been mentioned because of the Egyptian detailing proposed for the piers. This bridge was finally completed only in 1864 by W. H. Barlow (1812-92) using the materials of Brunel’s earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London. Of early arched metal bridges there are very many and by all the leading English engineers of the first half of the century: John Rennie (1761-1821), I. K. Brunel (1806-59), George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59), as well as Telford. The new railways, from the early thirties on, required even more bridges than the canals constructed by the previous generation.