Let those who have no concern with old times take their easeful way through the gloomy portals of the High Level Bridge, eighty-five feet above high-water mark. But let us examine the steep and smelly street, paved with vile granite setts and strewn with refuse, which conducts to the Tyne Bridge, or the Swing Bridge as it is nowadays, since the old structure was removed, the channel of the river deepened, and the wonderful swinging portion of the remodelled bridge, 281 feet in length, and swung open or closed by hydraulic power, constructed in 1876. With that work went the last fragments of the Roman bridge built by Hadrian (_Publius Aelius Hadrianus_) more than a thousand years before; a bridge which, indeed, gave the Roman camp its name of _Pons Ælii_. His bridge, long in ruins, was replaced in 1248 by a mediæval structure which was destroyed by a flood in 1771. This way came the coaches, climbing into Newcastle up Sandhill and the Side, whose steep and curving roadway remains to prove how difficult were the ways of travellers as well as transgressors in the old times. Old and new jostle here. The Swing Bridge turns silently on its pivot to the touch of a lever in its signal tower, and a force our grandfathers never knew performs the evolution; but side by side with this miracle still stand the darkling lanes and steep waterside alleys of Gateshead and Newcastle that were standing before science and commerce, mother and daughter, came down upon the Tyne and transformed it.