Penistone Bridges

Stone Bridges
I like bridges. Penistone has lots of good built-to-last stone ones and most of them date from the arrival of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century. That makes them around 150 years old. The first one below is near the cop shop on the main point of entry into Penistone. The original railway station would have been just to the right after the bridge.

The height sign says 14' 9" (fourteen feet nine inches). Most UK road signs use imperial measure but just around the corner is a sign saying it is 50m away at 14' 9" - metres and feet! Mind you, that's not so odd really. Aeroplane pilots use knots (nautical miles per hour), altitudes in feet, cloud cover in oktas (eighths of sky) and visibility in kilometres, all at the same time. The view beyond the bridge has now changed with a new roundabout.

Next is the last arch of the railway viaduct, on Sheffield Road, which is on a curve of the road. This one has seen a few gouges in its stonework. Four houses are being built on the narrow strip of land just over the wall and this bit is now being appropriately called 'Valley View'. I would call it 'Valley Drop' if they don't get it right. It has a very steep and rocky drop down to River Don that I used to climb down as a lad. At the bottom, there is a sort of rough pathway all along the river from the viaduct to the Cricket Club.

A Skip Truck Near-Miss
A fully-laden skip truck from the Spring Vale recycling centre ran into the viaduct bridge over Sheffield Road on a January 2008 afternoon, as pupils were walking home from Spring Vale primary school. The truck first hit one side of the bridge, then the other, then the skip came off the back and demolished a tall wall. This was just a few days after black and yellow warning patterns on the bridge had been re-painted. Three pedestrians were almost killed. The skip, its scrap metal load and parts of the wall all landed on sixteen-year-old Simon Town and he was very badly injured. The container had pushed Simon into the collapsing wall with refrigerators, cookers, bicycles, etc. poured out on top of him. If he had not been a fit and strong rugby player, he could easily have died on the spot.

A young girl was also badly injured. She had been walking with her mum, who herself had narrowly missed being injured. The girl received internal and leg injuries and could easily have been killed outright. A full description of her injuries is not appropriate for this website but she would be left with lasting damage to body and mind.

A newspaper report gave the story that the truck driver had been flashed by the headlights of an on-coming vehicle to let him through and chose to go through the bridge quickly so as to not cause a delay. From witness statements (the injured people) that is not how it happened. They attested to no other vehicles being on this part of road at the time. From the court case, it emerged that the driver had a string of speeding offences. He was fined £300 and banned from driving for three months.

The driver had a string of speeding offences from those unfortunate occasions when he had been caught. For this episode of life-threatening recklessness, he was fined £300 and banned from driving for three months. In May 2008, another skip truck from the same company overturned in Darton.

That Poor Bridge
According to a 2017 article in Barnsley Chronicle, the viaduct bridge over Sheffield Road (referred to above) had been hit 25 times by vehicles in five years, averaging five bridge strikes per year. The bridge has a triangular warning sign for 14' 9" clearance. In February 2021 there was another truck incident at the same bridge. A large, red box van owned by A Davies Transport Ltd. of Ossett became stuck under the viaduct bridge at 11am. The incident was attended by police and the Network Rail response van. The story goes that it was a new driver who did not know the local roads. In the same week three days later, a large box van owned by 'HandTrans' distribution and warehousing was almost stuck under the bridge and was damaged. It managed to get free with some effort.

The third picture shows where the high wall used to be by the cones and it gives a rare view of the penultimate viaduct arch. The view from a passing train on the bridge (also 2007) looks down on the wall before it was flattened.

The middle one in the middle section is near to the Wentworth pub by the railway station approach road. The last one in the middle section is a very high road bridge over the TP Trail at Rockside, Thurlstone. For good measure, the first picture on the bottom row is a tunnel end - I suppose it's a sort of extended bridge - also on the TP Trail heading towards Oughtibridge (pronounced 'ootybridge'). It was very eerie to cycle through there in total darkness before the lights were fitted. Old-ish maps and railway documents call the area Oughty Bridge.

The last two look at both sides of Spring Vale bridge. Both of these pictures are from 2004. I used to walk under it on my way to school and will always remember the sulphurous and oily smell of steam locomotives which seemed to impregnate their smell on the very walls of the bridge. What must have been the only working gas lamp for miles around cast its glow just inside the bridge. It had a clockwork timer to turn it on and off, which had to be wound up each week. It is long gone now. Another change took place in recent times, with the arrival of traffic lights. As it is a narrow road, vehicles need to travel in the middle of the road.