Bridge 191 On Leeds Liverpool Canal – Silsden, UK - Moving Bridges on Waymarking.com

The canal is 127.25 miles long and flows from the inland woollen town of Leeds to the coastal sea port of Liverpool, crossing the Pennines along the way. Work on the canal started in 1770 and built in a number of sections and was finally completed in 1816.

The canal is no longer operational for commercial traffic but is popular with leisure boaters.

This steel counterweight swing bridge is also known as Cowling bridge and was built to give access to farm fields.

The Moveable Bridges of Britain website tells us “John Powell reports that the old timber bridge was replaced by a steel swing bridge probably around 1980.

On my visit in July 2008 it was clear that this bridge is heavily used for moving a dairy herd between the farm on the north side of the canal and grazing land on the south side. This typifies what happened when the canals were built.

Canals often cut through the land owned by a farmer, and the enabling Act of Parliament usually specified that the canal company had to provide access across the canal to enable the landowner to reach fields that were being seperated from the main farm by the new construction. Sometimes canal companies might purchase small parcels of land in order to avoid the cost of a bridge, but it is clear that on the Leeds and Liverpool this policy was not adopted or was not achievable, resulting in a large number of bridges.

Swing or lift bridges were often cheaper to construct, partly because of the cost of building a brick overbridge but also because of the work needed to build ramps up to an overbridge. In this section of the Leeds and Liverpool the contour canal is part way up a hillside, so one bank is often a lot lower than the other, making the fixed bridge with ramps even more problematical.

The Leeds and Liverpool proprietors clearly had a bigger problem with divided lands than many companies - given that I have identified 93 sites where there are or have been swing bridges. Since there are also many higher level fixed bridges the cost of bridge building along the 127 mile route must have been enormous!

Cowling Bridge looked to be in good condition, and when I looked underneath I was surprised to see that it had no supporting undercarriage with wheels or bearings to spread the load, suspended and turning solely on the pintle.”

It is manually operated with a simple lever arm to push and pull the bridge into position.

A sign next to the push arm has the following operating instructions.

Bridge 191,
Cowling
Swing Bridge

To open bridge
Use handcuff key to unlock anti-vandal
locking mechanism
Use push arm to fully open bridge

To close bridge
Use push arm to close bridge fully
Relock anti-vandal lock mechanism

Please ensure bridge
is not left unlocked

Bridge Type: Swing Bridge Span: 40 feet over a clear waterway width of 17 ft 6 inches. Pedestrian Traffic: yes Bicycle Traffic: yes Vehicular Traffic: yes Railway Traffic: no Built: Not listed

Visit Instructions:
Take a picture of the bridge and record the exact coordinates where the picture was taken.

Recent Visits/Logs:

There are no logs for this waymark yet.