Queensferry Crossing

Listen first. Out over the water, the wind pulls at the steel cables, and a low, steady hum rises from the traffic far above. Gulls call along the shoreline. The air smells of salt and wet stone. In front of you, three pale towers stand in a line across the Firth of Forth. They are thin, upright and simple, and a fan of white cables runs down from each one to the road deck.

This is the Queensferry Crossing, the newest of the three great bridges that cross the Forth here. It links Fife, the old kingdom to the north, with the Lothians and Edinburgh to the south. If you have come down from Dunfermline, you have only travelled a few miles. Yet the view changes completely. The rolling farmland and the abbey town stay behind you, and the river opens out to the sea.

The bridge opened to traffic in late August 2017. A few days later, on 4 September, Queen Elizabeth the Second officially opened it. The date was chosen with care. Exactly 53 years earlier, on the same day in 1964, she had opened the Forth Road Bridge next door. Few monarchs open two great bridges over the same river, half a century apart, and a few hundred metres from each other.

Here is the first thing most visitors miss. Look closely at the middle of each span, halfway between two towers. The cables from neighbouring towers do not simply meet. They cross over each other and overlap. This crossed-cable design makes the long deck much stiffer. The engineers used the idea to support the central tower, which has no tower on either side to help hold it steady. At the time, nobody had built this feature on this scale anywhere in the world.

Those towers are also taller than they look from the shore. The highest rises more than two hundred metres above the water. That makes the Queensferry Crossing the tallest bridge in the United Kingdom. The whole structure runs for roughly 2,700 metres from shore to shore. It is the longest three-tower cable-stayed bridge in the world. In a cable-stayed bridge, the cables run straight from the towers to the deck. A suspension bridge works differently, and its road hangs from great swooping main cables.

The middle tower has an unusual foundation. It stands on Beamer Rock, a small island of rock in the centre of the firth. For many years, a lighthouse stood on the rock to warn ships away. Building on it needed careful work in cold, fast tidal water. Today the tower rises straight out of the river, and the old navigation danger now holds up a motorway.

Turn your head, and you can see why this place is so special. Three bridges from three centuries stand side by side. The red Forth Bridge carries trains and opened in 1890. It is a cantilever bridge, built from huge diamond-shaped frames of riveted steel. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015. Next to it is the grey Forth Road Bridge from 1964, a classic suspension bridge. Then comes the Queensferry Crossing, with its cables and its smooth concrete towers.

So why build a third bridge at all? The Forth Road Bridge carried far more traffic than its designers ever expected, and its main cables showed signs of wear. In December 2015, engineers found a crack in a key steel part, and that bridge closed for several weeks. Drivers in Fife faced long detours. The closure showed how much the region depended on one crossing. When the new bridge opened, it took over most road traffic. The older bridge now carries buses, taxis, cyclists and people on foot.

Wind is a constant force here. Storms come in from the North Sea and run straight up the estuary. In the past, high winds sometimes forced the Forth Road Bridge to close to lorries and other high vehicles. The Queensferry Crossing has wind shields along both edges of its deck. These barriers break up the gusts, so the bridge can stay open in weather that once stopped traffic. If you look along the deck from the shore, you can see the shields as a pale, continuous band.

The building of the bridge was a slow, careful process. Workers lifted the deck out over the water section by section, and they added pieces evenly on both sides of each tower. This kept every tower in balance as the road grew towards its neighbour. For months, people living on both shores watched the gaps between the deck sections become smaller. Then the sections finally met in the middle of the firth.

The name has an interesting story too. It was not chosen by a committee alone. Members of the public voted on a shortlist, and Queensferry Crossing won. The name connects the bridge to the two villages at either end, North Queensferry and South Queensferry. Both villages take their name from an old ferry. According to tradition, Saint Margaret, the medieval queen of Scotland, set up a ferry here for pilgrims travelling to Dunfermline and Saint Andrews. Margaret is buried at Dunfermline Abbey, so the bridge links back to the town you came from.

You cannot walk across this bridge, because it is a motorway. But before it opened, there was one rare chance. In September 2017, tens of thousands of people won places in a public ballot and walked across the empty deck. For one weekend, a motorway over the sea became a long promenade. Many local families still remember the day they stood high above the firth with the wind in their faces.

The best way to enjoy the crossing today is from a short distance. The waterfront at North Queensferry gives you a low view up to the towers. The footpath on the Forth Road Bridge lets you walk alongside the new bridge at the same height as its deck. From there you can see the cables cross in the middle of the spans. As you look, notice how the light changes on the towers. They look almost white on a clear morning and silver-grey under heavy cloud.

Stay a moment before you leave. Listen to the water against the rocks below, and the soft, continuous sound of traffic overhead. Ships move slowly under the spans, towards the open sea. Ferries once made this journey across open water, and Margaret's pilgrims made it in small boats. Now thousands of people cross every hour, high above the waves, without thinking about it. As you walk away, look back once more and count the three towers, and the three bridges, standing together across the Forth.