Bridges and castles

Under the bridges up the river path

The lap-top had to go to the local computer expert to get some glitches fixed. Computers are a bit like modern cars. Most of us use them daily to make all sorts of digital journeys to the shops, the bank, the library, even to the doctor's sometimes, but we haven't much idea what makes them tick so when they stop, it pays to get an expert opinion rather than tinker by yourself.

Waiting to collect the item, I spent a pleasant hour strolling along the banks of the Tweed from the Old Bridge built in the early seventeenth century to the Royal Tweed Bridge, which replaced it in the early twentieth century.

Looking up from the path, I could see the looming walls of the splendidly intact Elizabethan walls around the town.

 The great swan herd that gathers on the tweed estuary in the autumn was diminished presumably by the availability of food and nest sites upriver but some remained to glide seamlessly beneath the arches with the flow of the current.

The Royal Border Rail Bridge from the gun slit of the riverside guard-house

Further up the river the East Coast mainline crosses on the Royal Border Bridge, a magnificent viaduct carrying the railway to and from Berwick station.

The railway skirts the ramparts of Berwick's fortifications but the castle built by King David in the thirteenth century to protect what was then the major Scottish port, was in the way so it was demolished. The Great Hall where fate of the Scottish crown was decided is now a platform with an information board. 

The remains of the curtain wall - the White Wall - and a tower with gun-loops to guard access to the river are all that remains. After three hundred years of warfare between the Scots and the English when it changed hands many times and three hundred years of united peace, the castle had to make way for the railway.

The castle as it was with the guard house on the riverside

In the nineteenth century the impact of the railways must have been as encompassing as that of the internet today. Isolated villages where things had changed little since Jamie the Saxth of Scotland went south across the Tweed to become James I of the United Kingdom, now had access to and information about the wider world.

The internet has connected people all over the world in the way that the railways connected everyone in the country.

I can just carry it about on a phone or a laptop and ancient piles are safe.

 Someone created this whimsical boat from driftwood