Bohemian Antiks Continue

The strange tale of the beautiful bridge

We don't get much traffic here.  A rush hour of about ten cars that come past the house between six and eight in the morning, and then another rush hour in the evening between three and six.  But then there are the trucks.  How they found this road I don't know.  They are usually international, on long journeys avoiding the thirty euro fee to use the Czech motorways for a year.  Instead they thunder down our quiet lanes, destroying bridges,  killing cats and discouraging children from playing outside.  They are all definitely over the weight limits.   

When we first moved here, there was an ancient and beautiful stone bridge over Maple Tree Beck.  One day some workers came and sprayed it with concrete.  Thus destroying it.  You may think that spraying concrete on a structure will stop it falling down.  Unfortunately this is not true and the bridge was ruined.  It was not even possible to tell how pretty it had been.  I grieved for the pretty little bridge that had been.

Maple Tree Beck is a tiny thing, usually. Bringing water down from the two valleys above us.  Two valleys that are part of the obscure wetland borders between the Highlands and South Bohemia.  They are wild, unfarmed land.  An accidental nature reserve. But, a few times a decade the valley will flood, so it's necessary to have something to allow the water out.  A storm drain would probably have done the job of the little stone bridge, which was only a couple of metres wide. 

Then one day the road was closed completely and men with huge machines turned up. They simply dug the little stone bridge out of the ground and took it away for landfill.  An ignoble ending for such a pretty place.  I watched in horror as they dug, poured concrete, and finally slotted into place a prefab bridge.  Obviously it was some kind of standard size because it was huge. Wide. Deep.  They had to widen the road, which then narrows dangerously immediately after the bridge.

The concrete monstrosity was topped with the regulation green metal railing, and then to make the whole situation as bad as possible, they added a horrible crash barrier across the entire valley.  It was so ugly it hurt.   As bad as the time our neighbours built a cottage at the bottom of our garden, stealing the views of the wild valley for themselves, and replacing it with cottage, sheds and a stupidly incongruous suburban shrubbery.  Maybe it was time we sold up and moved somewhere more remote, where people could not just come along and ruin the aesthetics. 

But the huge, new bridge was not yet finished.  There were still men and machines two months later.  They added steps leading down to the water, a curb of large stones on each side of the water, huge rocks across the bed, filled with smaller stones so that the trickle of water was evenly distributed across the area under the bridge.  By the time they had finished they had created something... magical.

So now, by the White House we have a secret place of wonder.  If  you are travelling in this area on a hot day with small children, you can stop here and play in the shallow water in a lovely patch of shade.  If you are a cyclist it's a pleasant place to stop and wash your face.
 The water is safe and shallow and the rocks are pleasant places to perch.   On one of those oven-hot days, bring buckets and spades and sit and marvel with your bare feet in the cooling water.  It's so strange and unexpected. Whoever the architect was, I am very grateful for this fantastic creation.