THE Edwardian postcard on today's front cover says "Wishing you a Happy New Year" above a fine view of the sea, pier and glen at Saltburn. Any tourist staying for Christmas or New Year in any of the clifftop hotels or lodging houses at the railway seaside resort might have sent seasonal greetings on the postcard to their friends.

The postcard photographer is standing on the Ha'penny Bridge, which once spanned the deep glen. Henry Pease, the Darlington railway entrepreneur, developed Saltburn on the west side of the glen in the early 1860s. JT Wharton of Skelton Castle, who owned the land on the east side of the glen, wanted to cash in and so started building a carriage bridge to open up his estate in early 1869.

It was built by the Middlesbrough firm of Hopkins, Gilkes and Company and – slender and spectacular – it looks very similar to the iron trestle bridges of Belah and Deepdale that the company had built on Mr Pease's railway line over Stainmore.

Construction in Saltburn was held up when, on April 7, 1869, a girder fell from the top of the bridge to the fall 130ft below. It bounced, crashing into the central column, causing it to collapse.

In a split second, one of the three workmen on the column decided his best chance of survival was to jump. He died, struck by a girder, before he hit the ground.

"The other two men remained, but one of them was also killed instantaneously, and the other man died in a few minutes," said the Darlington and Stockton Times. "The bodies of the men were a sad, mangled sight, one man having his head literally smashed to atoms, and the man who breathed a few minutes had both his legs broken."

The fatalities were foreman James Denny, of Middlesbrough, and George Simpson and James Miles, both of Marske.

Work restarted, and the bridge was complete by September 1869. It was 650ft long, and offered spectacular views to the walkers who paid a halfpenny to cross it. It was strong and wide enough to take horsedrawn carriages (toll: 6d), and even early motorcars. They, though, were banned when a new-fangled internal combustion engine spooked a horse, which nearly threw its rider over the parapet into the glen.

In the resort's heyday before the First World War, the Ha'penny Bridge was a major part of the Saltburn experience. Crossing it must have been unforgettable – do you remember doing so?

Decay set in during the 1960s; in 1971, bits fell from it endangering lives in the glen. Restoration was prohibitively expensive, and so at 9.30am on December 17, 1974, it was detonated – it took only four seconds to collapse into a cloud of dust.

The demolition exercise cost £50,000 (about £450,000 in today's values) whereas the construction cost in 1869 had been just £7,000 (about £73,000 today).

One final, and sad, statistic about the Ha'penny Bridge: in its 105 years, 79 people committed suicide from it, all leaping the 130ft from its sea-facing parapet. Just one person survived the plunge and she, apparently, was a lady whose large skirt parachuted her to safety.

THE irony of the Saltburn New Year postcard is that it was sent from the resort on April 3, 1908, when a third of the new year was already over. "Here's a postcard of Saltburn as you desired, but it is not a very good one," wrote the send almost apologetically to his sister in "Dorsetshire".

Perhaps it was cheap in a souvenir shop.

Here's a second appropriate postcard that Bishop Auckland historian Tom Hutchinson has in his collection. Entitled "Pleasant days and prosperity to you", it shows a calendar of the new year, 1915. It was sent to Linlithgow in Scotland on November 9, 1914, when the First World War was only three months old and most people presumed it would be over by Christmas.

The message on the back reads: "Dear Annie, Hope the war is not effecting you much and that you are all going on alright, and keeping in the best of health the same as myself. What is up you can't write? Hope to hear from you soon. Yours, Jack."

ONE of the many stars of these Memories articles in 2014 has been the Brompton liberty stone, a stone we stumbled upon in the springtime to the east of Northallerton. It appeared in Memories 178.

The stone stands beside a lane at the top of a lung-busting hill south of the village of Brompton, near the hamlet of Bullamoor. Carved on it are the words "Brumpton liberty north 1759".

A liberty was an area of land either where someone was free to do something, such as graze their cattle, or where the local lord of the manor was all powerful and so the people did not owe allegiance to the county of Yorkshire.

We never quite got to the bottom of Brompton stone's meaning, but it was amazing to stand in front of it and think that for 255 years, with its ornate carving, it had stood sentry-like beside that remote lane.

Memories went past it again, recently, and was disappointed to note that a clumsy vehicle had given the stone a hell of a thwack, knocking it sideways and drawing blood – well, chipping off a piece to reveal clean, unweathered stone.

We really should cherish our strange local heritage a little more.