A bridge too far: Carlisle’s Eden Bridges

Abstractions - holmes - floods - folk speech - rivers changing course - bridges - droving

Walking back into the city from the Vallum Gallery on Brampton Road through Rickerby Park in early October 2016, I was struck by standing water on the floodplain. Reflecting still on some of the pictures I’d been looking at, I thought about how the landscape and river route had changed, or been changed here, and about the floods. I’m thinking about abstracted map representations of Cumbria (e.g. abstracting the rivers and becks from the rest, like an arterial/venal map of the body, as part of understanding flooding), and about embellishments – embroidering over printed maps to show the floods, or embroidering over pictures to show where things happened – there I capsized my canoe, here my parents dropped my brother in a beck.

Rickerby floodplain / Carlisle from the North East	Here I capsized my canoe

The lower Eden is characterised by meanders and holmes, flat semi-islands that are attractive locations for cricket pitches. Whilst the Norse 'holmr' means small island (think Stockholm), here they've become semi islands, dry patches surrounded by marshy/fen land. The shape of the land suggests the river has been flooding for very many years, and the old OS maps of Carlisle have 'liable to flooding' marked on every holme. I remember the water from the same river coming up through our cellar in Temple Sowerby when the water table rose – if there was standing water on the floodplain by the bridge, there would be water in our cellar soon.

Bizarrely, the Google satellite map of much of Carlisle is taken in the immediate aftermath of Desmond, stitched onto the next picture to the north taken at another time, and showing water where water shouldn't be. The roads have been hand-drawn back onto the image.

A strange rectangular cloud over the city	Floodwater in Rickerby park suddenly ending where the pictures are joined

One of the things that stuck in my mind post-floods was a magazine writer being annoyed at Carlisle people referring to their bridge that was shut as “Eden Bridges” – when there’s only one bridge. And it’s true, I’ve observed one of my colleagues, who lives over the bridge, calling it Eden Bridges. Search for the reports from 7th December 2015 and half the headlines pluralised the bridge. It’s a folk memory in speech, of when there were two end-to-end bridges crossing this branch of the river, originally known as the Priest Beck, and the branch that ran round the back of the islanded Sands, where the cattle markets and bull baitings were held.

A map forming the back screen at Borderlines shows the old route of the river in the days when the city stayed within its walls and Botcherby, Etterby, Rickerby and Harraby were villages nearby. Transposed onto a modern map, the river route was something like this:

Carlisle today	The walled city and divided river

Remembering pre-GCSE Geography and the theory of oxbow lakes, a far as I can currently work out, something like this happened:

• Original route of river meanders, Priestbeck doesn't exist
• River breaks out and creates Priestbeck, probably after a flood event - possibly around 1572 (this sketch map from 1572, south at the top, shows a breach of the river in need of repair, without a bridge over it, where Priest beck would otherwise be). On the other hand, Magna Britannica (1816) reports: "The two bridges over the Eden at Carlisle, called Eden Bridge and Prestbeck Bridge, were of wood in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; when one of them having fallen down, and the other being in a state of great decay, an act of parliament passed for rebuilding them at the expence of the county in 1600. It is probable that they were then first constructed of stone."
• For a time, river flow is divided between the Priestbeck and the Old Eden loop (e.g. George Smith 1746 & 1752 maps , reproduced in Cattle Droving through Cumbria, Peter Roebuck, Bookcase 2016), but eventually the main flow goes over Priestbeck and the Old Eden starts to dry up (in theory forming an oxbow lake which shrinks away over time)
• The island of the Sands is likely to be marshy and prone to flooding (as the 1752 George Smith map suggests), limiting the ways the city could use it
• There are two bridges and frequent calls for them to be repaired and rebuilt throughout the eighteenth century, perhaps indicative of flood damage (and failure to cope with the volume of traffic, notably droving)
• 1807 Act of Parliament approves funding of £10,000 towards the rebuilding of Priestbeck Bridge, given its strategic importance to the northbound road. The new bridge was built 1812-15 and doubled in width in 1932
• Old Eden Bridge (south) was removed "and a raised and partly arched causeway ...formed, connecting the town with the new bridge".
• 1865 OS has a municipal boundary (ward boundary) following (probably) the line of the old Eden. No physical sign of the old river.
• 1898 OS has cattle market, one bridge, old racecourse and the first Hardwicke Circus roundabout which opened in 1892/93. Oddly no Drovers Lane.
• Civic Centre opened 1964, late 1970 new road layout opened (rebuilt Hardwicke Circus, Georgian Way; Castle Way opened in 1974); Sands Centres opened 1985. Presumably further land drainage (building on stilts might have been a good idea) to secure the foundations of these various structures?

In 1997 as part of the Arch/Millennium Sheepfolds projects, Andy Goldsworthy tried to find the location of the pinfold at the civic centre - and decided it was probably under the civic centre. After photographing the journey of the Arch, the project aimed to (re)build sheepfolds in the places they once were; the Carlisle pinfold has not yet been rebuilt. With the arrival of Debenhams in 2000, Drover's Lane was built over and moved northwards and the view Goldsworthy took there is gone.