BY the time you read this, one of the most curious corners of the North- East may be the last upholder of the Union.

This honour could fall to the Union suspension bridge, which spans the Tweed and crosses the border in the middle of countryside to the west of Berwick. After nearly 200 years, its hour has come and it has starred in numerous TV programmes recently as a backdrop to the independence campaign.

It deserves its moment in the spotlight because it is a brilliant bridge, built in 1820 by Sir Samuel Brown. He was a Royal Navy captain who became fed up of his ships floating away when the hemp ropes holding them to the quayside snapped, so he invented a stronger chain of wrought iron links.

With his ships tightly tethered, Sir Samuel wondered what else he could do with his chains and decided to hang bridges from them. The joy was that a Brown bridge cost a third of a traditional masonry construction and took half as long to build.

Such value impressed the trustees of the Berwick and North Durham Turnpike Trust, who wanted to transport coal and lime to Scottish markets. They raised £7,700 and commissioned Sir Samuel’s first bridge.

He suspended it from rock on the English side and hung it from a tower on the Scottish side and, amazingly, it didn’t fall down.

On July 26, 1820, he edged over it in a curricle – a small horsedrawn chariot which gets its name from the Latin curriculum, meaning running. When the curricle and its 12 laden wagons made it safely across, 700 spectators thronged onto the bridge and marvelled at its ingenuity.

They were fortunate, because few of Sir Samuel’s bridges were so successful – on March 19, 1830, his Esk suspension bridge at Montrose gave way during a boat race, and three spectators fell to their icy deaths.

And then there was the construction that he hung across the Tees to carry the Stockton and Darlington Railway to Port Darlington (or Middlesbrough, as we know it today).

It was the world’s first railway suspension bridge, but when the first train went across it on December 10, 1830, the deck wobbled and the Yorkshire pillar cracked so that masonry tumbled from it.

Then the deck rose up in the middle, creating a mini-mountain with eight trucks going up the Durham slope while the other eight went rolling down the Yorkshire side.

Even after urgent repairs, the only way to get a train safely across was by chaining the trucks 27ft apart so that the load was evenly spread.

And still the bridge swayed so alarmingly that one engine driver refused to stay in his cab when crossing it. As he approached the suspect bridge, he would set his engine to “crawl”, jump from the footplate, sprint across the swinging deck and then wait on the other side for his engine to catch him up.

After 13 years of such fears, Robert Stephenson built a conventional bridge over the Tees at Stockton, rendering Sir Samuel’s pioneering attempt redundant.

Which is why Sir Samuel’s Union bridge, still proudly spanning the watery border after nearly 200 years, is so splendidly curious – although perhaps the wobbling, swaying, cracking Tees bridge is a better metaphor for the state of the Union this morning.

  • Visit unionbridgefriends.com for more on the Union Bridge