V is for viaducts
A soaring addition to the landscape.
BLINK AND YOU’LL miss it. You’re fleetingly suspended in mid-air as the train whooshes from one side of a valley to the other, gliding over river, roads and houses.
It’s hard to appreciate a viaduct when you’re sandwiched inside the 7:35 from King’s Cross. For most passengers, they’re purely functional – a blur of masonry spanning the gaps and distances between start and destination. But for onlookers, an old railway viaduct can be a thing of beauty – the focal point of a great walk.
Straddling the landscape, their elegant arches embody a golden age of engineering, combining infrastructure and artistry. But these one-time eyesores weren’t always looked upon fondly. In 1871, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin was especially scathing about the Headstone Viaduct in Derbyshire.
‘There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe…’ he wrote. ‘You enterprised a railroad through the valley, you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.’
Ironically, modern devotees of the Peak District couldn’t imagine Monsal Dale without the Headstone Viaduct. Like many of its brethren bridges, it’s now a listed structure – a cherished local landmark, even if its tracks are long gone. It joins Meldon in Devon and Conisborough in Yorkshire as silver linings to railway cuts in the last century, repurposed as eye-popping additions to the national walking and cycling network.
Over time, viaducts have earned their place in the landscape. The cream of the crop includes Sussex’s Ouse Valley Viaduct, adorned with palatial balustrades and Italianate pavilions. There’s the monstrously long Welland Viaduct, spanning two counties with 82 brick arches. And budding wizards will know the curving concrete of Glenfinnan, crossed by the Hogwarts Express for its big-screen role in three Harry Potter films.
Viaducts hold stories, like that of a horse and cart entombed inside Loch nan Uamh Viaduct. But one stands out from the rest, and not just because it stars in countless postcards and calendars. Its story is one of hard toil and tragedy set in the Yorkshire Dales.
Yorkshire’s Wild West
The year is 1870 and a Methodist Missionary from Bradford is hotfooting it to an ungodly part of the world. James Tiplady’s soul-saving mission won’t take him to some far-flung outpost of empire however – he’s travelling just 40 miles away, to a desolate fellside in Ribblesdale. What brings him there is the greatest engineering feat of the decade… and the rowdy, ragtag workforce that’s building it.
Work began on the 72-mile Settle-Carlisle Line a year earlier. The Midland Railway would end up shelling out £3.5 million (several hundred million in today’s money) on a route to rival existing lines from London to Scotland. Mile for mile, it was the most expensive railway ever built in Britain, chiefly due to its budget-busting series of cuttings, embankments, 14 tunnels and 20 viaducts. The longest and easily most famous of these viaducts is the 440-yard bridge célèbre at Ribblehead.
Conveying trains 107 feet above terra firma, its 24 arches span the dale between Yorkshire’s highest mountains: Whernside and Ingleborough. It was this now empty expanse of barren moorland that James Tiplady was bound for. While the railway’s managers wrestled with spiralling expenditure, he dealt with the human cost of taming Yorkshire’s unforgiving terrain.
All along the route of the emergent railway, an army of 6000 itinerant workers set up temporary homes and workshops. Up to 1000 navvies pitched up at Ribblehead, where many would live for the next five years. Incredibly, few signs of their presence survive. A decade before mechanical excavators would make lighter work of construction, this would be the last major railway built mainly by hand.
There’s only a station and pub at Ribblehead today, but if you mosey across Blea Moor Road in the direction of the viaduct, you’re strolling down what was the makeshift high street of Batty Green. It was one of nine shanty towns spread out around the mire, shake holes and limestone scars of Batty Moss. Their names, like ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Inkerman’, were mostly taken from the bible and Crimean War victories. Appropriately, supervisors enjoyed plusher lodgings in ‘Belgravia,’ set away from hoi polloi on higher, drier ground.
Joined by their wives and children, ordinary labourers shared ramshackle wooden huts, raised on stone foundations. Inside, homely decorations adorned the walls, dimly lit by oil lamps and stoves. The 74 buildings at Batty Green also included shops, a school, a library, a post office and pubs like ‘ The Welcome Home’. The town was digitally recreated in 2016 for ITV drama Jericho, but for its small screen role, Ribblehead became Culverdale.
It had the atmosphere of a frontier town in America’s Wild West, but nobody intended on settling here. Cold, damp and boring, camp life could be miserable. It lies five miles from the nearest town and the weather alone made it an inhospitable place. Icy winds from the Irish Sea were funnelled up the dale, bringing torrential rain and snowstorms. When not engaged in wholesome singsongs and gospel readings, navvies lived up to their reputation for drinking and brawling. Tempers flared easily, and at times, policemen struggled to maintain law and order.
Navvies enjoyed relatively good pay, but their daily wages were quickly spent on rent, food and beer. Their work involved long, backbreaking hours, fraught with danger. It’s reckoned 100 died in accidents during the construction of the line, but smallpox outbreaks proved even deadlier.
An isolation hospital was built outside Batty Green, where epidemics claimed 80 lives, including men, women and children. Victims of accident and illness were buried in the hastily extended churchyard of St Leonard’s in nearly Chapel-le-Dale. Their graves are mostly unmarked, but a brass plaque now commemorates the 200 people buried here.
In spite of disease and disaster, work on the new
Navvies took their name from the ‘navigators’ who built Britain’s canals.
railway progressed unabated. A slight grassy embankment peeling away from the viaduct was a temporary tramway built for moving materials around the site with narrow gauge locomotives. Lumps and bumps in the turf are clues to what once stood here. Under a thick layer of peat are the foundations for brickworks and the locomotive workshop of Sebastopol.
The ghostly tramway curves up to the far bank abutting the viaduct. Once across it, northbound trains face a 1-in-100 uphill gradient into Blea Moor Tunnel, climbing the final leg of ‘the long drag’ to Britain’s highest mainline station at Dent. A bridleway tails the tracks for the first mile, veering up and away as the railway goes underground.
Marking the route of the line’s longest tunnel, a line of stubby chimney pots and oversized molehills punctuate the moor. These air shafts and spoil dumps materialised as navvies toiled their way through one-and-a-half miles of solid rock. By digging down at intervals, miners could excavate several sections of the tunnel at the same time, not just each end. It was hard graft with a pickaxe and shovel, hampered further by the perils of flooding and a laissez faire approach to dynamite.
Above ground, the flagstone path tramped by Yorkshire Three Peaks challengers eases uphill, rising nonchalantly onto the tufted crest of Whernside. A drystone wall leads to the top of Yorkshire, 2415 feet up. From this lofty vantage point, the Ribblehead Viaduct is shrunk to train set proportions, while Ingleborough bares its best side. Striped with limestone outcrops, its long whale’s SEPTEMBER 2018 back outline culminates in a table-top summit.
A footpath plunges into the dale and links up with farm tracks leading under the viaduct. When the railway eventually opened in 1875, its nomadic builders dismantled their prefab homes and moved on. Batty Green returned to the silent wasteland it was before, except for the occasional rumble of a passing train.
Fast-forward 100 years and the future of the Settle-Carlisle Line looks bleak. Revenue and investment have declined, all but two stations have closed, and by 1981 the Ribblehead Viaduct needs costly repairs. Three years later, British Rail set a date for closure. Locals weren’t prepared to let it go without a fight however.
A campaign to save the railway gets underway, passenger numbers grow and stations reopen.
“From this lofty vantage point, the Ribblehead Viaduct is shrunk to trainset proportions, while Ingleborough bares
side.” its best
Walkers would play their part in saving the line, snapping up tickets for special trains. By 1989, the demolition crews were called off and the Settle to Carlisle Railway begins a new chapter in its story.
The Ribblehead Viaduct was restored in 1992 – just in time, as overburdened timetables elsewhere mean the railway is now a vital freight route. Today, steam-hauled charter trains are a regular sight, puffing their way over the dales. Since 2012, the annual Ride2Stride Festival sees hundreds of walkers set off into the hills of Yorkshire and Cumbria from the line’s ‘Derby Gothic’ stations.
The viaduct has come to symbolise the railway and a tenacity of spirit, both past and present. Like others, it’s become an intrinsic part of the landscape and a monument to the people who built it.