Menai Suspension Bridge

Stand still for a moment and listen. Below you, the Menai Strait is moving, and it is moving fast. The water slides between Anglesey and the Welsh mainland with a low, steady rush. Above it, a road hangs from iron. Look up at the chains as they curve down from the stone towers... and then rise again on the far side. This is the Menai Suspension Bridge, and for a long time it had no equal anywhere in the world.

Before this bridge, Anglesey was an island in the full sense of the word. To reach it, you took a boat. Ferries crossed the strait at several points, and the crossings could be dangerous. The tides here pull in two directions, and the currents are strong. Farmers who wanted to sell their cattle on the mainland had an even harder task. The drovers often made the animals swim across the strait. Picture herds of black Welsh cattle pushing through cold salt water toward the far shore.

So why build a bridge here at all? The answer lies across the sea, in Ireland. After the Act of Union in 1800, Ireland was governed from London. Politicians, officials and the Irish mail all needed a fast, reliable route between the two capitals. That route ran through North Wales to the port of Holyhead, on the far side of Anglesey. The Menai Strait was the weak link in the chain. A permanent crossing was needed.

The man chosen for the job was Thomas Telford, a Scottish engineer. Telford was already building the great road from London to Holyhead, the road we now know as the A5. He planned this bridge as part of that road. Construction began in 1819. It took about seven years of work before the bridge opened to traffic, at the very end of January in 1826.

Now look at how high the deck sits above the water. This height was not a choice for drama. It was a condition. The strait was an important passage for sailing ships, including the tall-masted vessels of the Royal Navy. The Admiralty insisted that those ships could pass beneath the bridge without lowering their masts. So the roadway had to stand roughly thirty metres above high water. A tall, slender suspension bridge was the answer.

Take a closer look at the stone. The towers and the arches that lead up to them are made of pale limestone. This stone came from quarries at Penmon, on the eastern tip of Anglesey. Run your eye along the approach arches. They carry the road in from each shore like a stone viaduct. Notice how the towers taper slightly as they rise. The archways at their tops are where the road passes straight through the stone.

Here is a detail many visitors walk past without noticing. The chains do not simply end at the shore. They continue down into the ground on each side, into tunnels cut deep in the rock. There they are anchored firmly, so that the weight of the whole deck pulls against the bedrock itself. In a sense, the bridge does not just rest on Wales and Anglesey. It holds on to them.

The chains you see today are not the originals. Telford used wrought iron, linked bar by bar, and that iron was hauled into place across the open water. A suspension bridge at this scale was new, and the strait tested it hard. Strong winds made the early deck sway and twist, and parts of it needed repair and strengthening over the following decades. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the old iron chains were replaced with steel ones. The shape stayed faithful to Telford's design.

Now turn your gaze along the strait, to the south-west. In the distance you may see a second crossing, the Britannia Bridge. It was built by Robert Stephenson around the middle of the nineteenth century to carry the railway. Stephenson's original design was very different. It used enormous iron tubes that trains ran through. In 1970, a fire badly damaged those tubes. The bridge was rebuilt with arches, and today it carries both trains and a road.

The two bridges tell a quiet story about the age that built them. Telford's bridge was made for horses, coaches and the mail. Within a few decades, the railway arrived and changed travel completely. Yet the older bridge did not fall out of use. It still carries everyday traffic, more than two centuries after it opened. That is a remarkable working life for any structure, let alone one that was an experiment in its own time.

You are standing close to a village with a famous name. Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, often shortened to Llanfairpwll, sits just a short distance along the Anglesey shore. Its very long version of the name is well known around the world. Local tradition holds that it was created in the nineteenth century, partly as a way to draw visitors to the village railway station. The railway, of course, came across the strait just down the water from here.

If you have time, walk across the bridge on foot. There are footpaths along the deck. Halfway across, stop and look down at the water. You may see it boiling and swirling in places as the tide works its way through. Sailors have long treated this stretch of the strait with great respect. From the middle of the span, you also get a fine view of the small wooded islands and the shoreline houses on both banks.

When you reach the shore again, look back at the whole bridge in one frame. Follow one chain from tower to tower with your eye. Notice the thin vertical rods that hang from it and hold up the deck. Each one carries a small share of the load. Together they hold up the road you just walked along. As you leave, listen once more for the water underneath... still moving, just as it did before any bridge was here.