WHITBY has many landmarks, from the jawbones that frame every photograph on the west to the craggy abbey and the rather creepy church high on the headland to the east.

I’d never considered the swing bridge in the middle before, mainly because I’d never had time to. Whenever I visit, the crowds jostling across it are so dense that if you stop for a moment a long backlog of angry West Yorkshire day-trippers builds up behind or just ploughs straight on through.

There has been plenty of time this week, though, because on its 101st birthday, the bridge broke down midway through its swing-cycle. It’s stuck open, cutting the town in two, severing east from west for the first time in at least 650 years.

Throughout those centuries, it has been the sort of lady which requires a lot of maintenance.

The first mention of a bridge over the Esk is in 1351 when Edward III all-owed tolls to be collected from users to maintain it. In 1407, John Schillbotyll kindly left an oak tree in his will to repair it.

In 1691, the Quarter Sessions at Stokesley summoned all residents whose properties adjoined the bridge to explain how it had fallen into disrepair. The court said the decay was “occasioned by their eves dropping”.

Our word “eavesdropping” comes about because you had to stand where the water from the eaves dripped in order to listen in to your neighbours’ conversation. The wooden bridge was not being destroyed by gossip, but by its neighbours’ water run-off.

In the late 17th Century, the court cracked down on another menace. It regularly fined sailors for “fastening boats to the jewells of Whitby Bridge”. The jewels, or jowels, was a Yorkshire word referring to the starling of a bridge – the protective pontoon around its supports.

What with ships tugging at its jewels and the sea – and boats – crashing into it, the wooden bridge was very vulnerable. So in 1766, a £3,000 drawbridge was built on stone pillars. It was a spiderous structure, with lots of flimsy wooden legs operating a block and pulley system which pulled up the deck.

Ships’ rigging often became ensnared in the web of legs, damaging boat and bridge, so in March 1835 it was replaced by a £10,000 swing bridge.

Elegant and robust, it swung neatly out of the way when a ship wanted to pass. But it was narrow. Only ships less than 45ft wide could squeeze through, and the up-river boatyards wanted to build much bigger.

In 1906, the council commissioned a new bridge which would be 100ft wide and “of sufficient strength to carry a traction engine weighing 15 tons”. While it was being constructed by the same Manchester firm which built the Blackpool Tower, a temporary footbridge was thrown over the Esk.

The Northern Echo reported that on July 24, 1909, the wife of Whitby MP Sir Gervase Beckett “severed with a pair of silver-mounted scissors the silk ribbon stretched across the centre of the new bridge, and declared it open, the dedication being joyously acclaimed by the dense crowd”.

The £22,582 14s 5d bridge swung straight into action, allowing the lifeboat to pass, and remained operational until its 101st birthday, when it required a £21,000 part from Italy.

The bridge is the sort of grand old lady of the sea that I really should have paid more attention to instead of concentrating on keeping the kids, transfixed by their large ice creams, moving along her shiny-smooth pavement, despite the dense crowds.