meish dot org: life, unfolding

When we were oop north, we visited Ribblehead Viaduct, which is (I think) Britain’s longest viaduct (with 24 spans), part of the famous Settle-Carlisle railway. It’s situated slap-bang in the middle of a remote and bleak moor, where the navvies set up camp during the building of the railway.

I’ve wanted to visit ever since primary school, when we learnt a song about the building of that particular railway. Can’t find any reference to it online, so in the interests of posterity (hello posterity!), here’s the snippet I remember:

Twas in the year of 69, they planned to run a train
From Settle to Carlisle all across the mountain range
They employed 3000 navvies to build this mighty road
And across the fells to Appleby, the old steam engine rolled

(chorus)
And it’s [stamp] up in the morning lads in
[stamp] wind snow or hail
[stamp] hold tight to your hammer lads let’s
[stamp] lay another rail

That’s all I can recall. Obviously left quite an impression!

Although we visited on two separate days, the contrast couldn’t have been greater – one day was stormy and wild, with wind whipping freezing rain into our chapped faces. The other day was sunny and frozen, but calm. A great day for photography…

After uploading my photos, I noticed that there was (amazingly) no Ribblehead group yet on Flickr. So I made one, and invited a bunch of people who had pics of the viaduct to post theirs, too. I’m chuffed to say that less than a day later, it’s really taken off.

The best way to experience the structure is to go there, obviously (take a hat!) but a close second is to view the Ribblehead Viaduct group pool slideshow on Flickr. It’s really interesting seeing how all sorts of different people have captured and recorded and approached and viewed a single structure.