The Ken Bridge is a road bridge about north east of

New Galloway New Galloway () is a town in the historical county of Kirkcudbrightshire in Dumfries and Galloway. It lies on the west side of the valley of the Water of Ken, north of the end of Loch Ken. Before the local government reform of 1975, it was the s ...

Dumfries and Galloway Dumfries and Galloway (; ) is one of the 32 unitary council areas of Scotland, located in the western part of the Southern Uplands. It is bordered by East Ayrshire, South Ayrshire, and South Lanarkshire to the north; Scottish Borders to the no ...

, Scotland, which carries the A712 road over the

Water of Ken The Water of Ken is a river in the historical county of Kirkcudbrightshire in Galloway, south-west Scotland.It rises on Blacklorg Hill, north-east of Cairnsmore of Carsphairn in the Carsphairn hills, and flows south-westward into The Glenkens, ...

towards

Balmaclellan Balmaclellan (Scottish Gaelic: ''Baile Mac-a-ghille-dhiolan'', meaning town of the MacLellans) is a small hillside village of stone houses with slate roofs in a fold of the Galloway hills in south-west Scotland. To the west, across the Ken River ...

. Designed by John Rennie shortly before his death, it has been designated a

Category A listed building Category, plural categories, may refer to: General uses *Classification, the general act of allocating things to classes/categories Philosophy * Category of being * ''Categories'' (Aristotle) * Category (Kant) * Categories (Peirce) *Category (V ...

History

Built between 1821 and 1822 to a design by Rennie, it replaced an earlier bridge in the same location, also by Rennie, which was completed in 1811 but destroyed by flooding shortly afterwards. Rennie died on 4 October 1821, before the construction of the bridge was complete.

Description

The bridge is entirely made of granite

ashlar Ashlar () is a cut and dressed rock (geology), stone, worked using a chisel to achieve a specific form, typically rectangular in shape. The term can also refer to a structure built from such stones. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, a ...

, roughly finished for the most part, with polished granite surfaces on the inner faces of the

parapet A parapet is a barrier that is an upward extension of a wall at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes ultimately from the Italian ''parapetto'' (''parare'' 'to cover/defend' and ''petto'' 'chest/brea ...

and on the

soffit A soffit is an exterior architectural feature, generally the horizontal, aloft underside of the roof edge. Its archetypal form, sometimes incorporating or implying the projection of rafters or trusses over the exterior of supporting walls, is t ...

s. It curves along its length, and has a total span of , with the widest central arch spanning approximately . Its

pier A pier is a raised structure that rises above a body of water and usually juts out from its shore, typically supported by piling, piles or column, pillars, and provides above-water access to offshore areas. Frequent pier uses include fishing, b ...

s are supported on the riverbed by round-nosed

cutwater A cutwater is the forward part of the prow or stem of a watercraft around the waterline The waterline is the line where the hull of a ship meets the surface of the water. A waterline can also refer to any line on a ship's hull that is paralle ...

s, and the

spandrel A spandrel is a roughly triangular space, usually found in pairs, between the top of an arch and a rectangular frame, between the tops of two adjacent arches, or one of the four spaces between a circle within a square. They are frequently fil ...

s between the arches are decorated with

pilaster In architecture, a pilaster is both a load-bearing section of thickened wall or column integrated into a wall, and a purely decorative element in classical architecture which gives the appearance of a supporting column and articulates an ext ...

s. The bridge has been praised for its aesthetic qualities. Architectural historian John Gifford, writing in the Dumfries and Galloway volume of the

Pevsner Architectural Guides The ''Pevsner Architectural Guides'' are four series of guide books to the architecture of the British Isles. ''The Buildings of England'' series was begun in 1945 by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, with its forty-six original volumes pu ...

series, described it as a "long elegant curve of granite ashlar", and John R. Hume, the former chief inspector of historic buildings for

Historic Scotland Historic Scotland () was an executive agency of the Scottish Government, executive agency of the Scottish Office and later the Scottish Government from 1991 to 2015, responsible for safeguarding Scotland's built heritage and promoting its und ...

, wrote that it was the "most elegant of Rennie's bridges in the South-West... ...five graded segmental arches leap the Ken's floodplain in a long, low streamlined curve." The bridge now carries the A712 road towards

. It was designated a Category A listed building in 1971.

References

Sources

* * * * * * {{refend Category A listed buildings in Dumfries and Galloway Road bridges in Scotland 19th-century establishments in Scotland Bridges completed in 1821