A1-The Great North Road
by Jon Speed, 1611
By David Gentleman, 1964
Geoffrey Grigson wrote the following text to accompany David Gentleman's painting in the Shell Book of the Road in 1964:
"Nowadays the Great North Road, A1, crosses the Tweed into the county of the borough and town of Berwick, that hiatus between two kingdoms, by the high-level concrete bridge which was built in three years between 1925 and 1928. For centuries, traffic had rumbled over the Tweed on the fifteen arches of the Old Bridge, which took twenty-four years, four months and four days to build and was finished in 1634, the pride then of Berwick, displacing a worn-out affair of timber. You can use it still, if you prefer the historic route; on either side it has cut-waters, which allow for triangular "outlets" through the low walls, in which pedestrians took refuge from the wheels.
"In earlier days, the jurisdiction of Berwick extended only to the sixth pair of "outlets" from the Berwick end. Beyond them, the bridge was a part, not of Northumberland, which nowadays is the first and last English county, but of Norhamshire, once a separate outlying part of County Durham. Sods were always placed in the sixth pair of outlets to show the Berwick constables (or the Norhamshire constables) how far they could, and how far they couldn't, pursue offenders."
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2002