Railway accommodation bridge BIF/9 in Auckland Castle Park

Summary

Railway accommodation bridge, 1885 for the Spennymoor Branch of the North Eastern Railway Company.

Reasons for Designation

This railway accommodation bridge, of 1885 for the North Eastern Railway, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* a striking and handsome example of a late-C19 railway bridge associated with one of the major railway companies;
* it is well-executed in good quality stone that displays a good level of craftsmanship, seen especially in the finishes and detailing;
* the level of architectural accomplishment is thought to reflect its role in carrying the railway across part of Auckland Castle Park.

Group value:

* it benefits from a historic and functional group value with three other railway bridges on the same line, and with numerous other listed buildings situated within the registered landscape of Auckland Castle Park.

History

Auckland Castle Park originated as a deer park for the Prince Bishops of Durham, probably in the C11 or C12, associated with their residence at Auckland Castle. The park had a herd of wild cattle until the C17 and there are records of successive restocking with deer. The park fell into decline during the Interregnum at which time the trees were cut down, but it was restocked, and the fishponds renewed by Bishop Cosin during the period 1660 to 1671. In 1750 Bishop Butler extended the park to take in areas of woodland and began renewing the pale and planting, operations which were interrupted by his death in 1752. He was succeeded by Bishop Trevor, who continued with the improvements, spending more than £8000 on the Castle and park during the period 1752 to 1771. Ewan Christian undertook a refurbishment of Castle and park during the 1880s for Bishop Lightfoot.

This bridge (Engineer’s Line Reference (ELR) number BIF/9) was constructed for the North Eastern Railway (NER) to carry the Bishop Auckland and Spennymoor Branch line (later known as the Bishop Auckland and Ferryhill Branch) across a carriage drive just inside the north-eastern boundary of Auckland Park. The line opened in 1885 and closed to all services in 1966. The bridge now (2021) forms part of a disused-railway walking trail.

Details

Railway accommodation bridge, 1885 for the Spennymoor Branch of the North Eastern Railway Company.

MATERIALS: snecked sandstone, for the most part rock-faced with smooth margins; a red brick arch barrel.

PLAN: a single-span bridge with abutments and embanked approaches with retaining walls.

DESCRIPTION: not inspected, information from other sources. The bridge comprises a high semi-circular, horse-shoe arch about 4.8m wide by 4.5m span with the crown rising to 7.88m above ground level. The rings of the arch rise from impost bands of large stepped voussoirs with stepped ends that key directly in to the spandrels. A horizontal string course at deck level separates the spandrels from the parapets. Impost bands and string coursing are rockfaced and margined in keeping with the masonry elsewhere, but rise from a smooth, concave lower moulding. The parapets terminate in end piers, emphasised by breaking forward from the parapets slightly (their caps also rise marginally higher than the intervening coping), all formed of large rectangular blocks again rock-faced and margined except for the inner (non-public-fronting) faces which are simply tooled and margined. The coping stones to the eastern parapet and caps to all four piers are rockfaced apart from their internal faces (tooled to match the parapet walls), but the coping stones to the western parapet are tooled in their entirety with lightly chamfered edges, suggesting they are secondary. The tops of all coping stones slope down slightly towards the external elevations, presumably to shed water. The public-fronting faces of the four caps plus the eastern parapet coping consist of two stages: a first-stage, smooth, concave moulding (as per the impost bands and string coursing) succeeded by a rectangular moulding. On the caps this second stage rises to a low relief pyramid, with the intersections between the faces of each pyramid picked out by broad channelling so as to form the shape of a saltire when viewed from above. Identical but thinner caps occur on the end piers to the embankment retaining walls, which break both forward and back from the adjacent walling. The walls themselves slope out slightly towards their base, curve down towards the end piers and have coping very similar to that on the eastern parapet, but rock-faced and margined on all surfaces and, like the caps on the adjoining piers, of a much thinner profile. Some of the coping stones are dislodged and/or missing.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

385632

Legacy System:

LBS

Sources

Websites
The Road, Rail and Parkland Bridges of Bishop Auckland, Co Durham, 4/2021: an assessment of the historical and archaeological evidence, M Jecock 2021, accessed 18-02-2021 from https://research.historicengland.org.uk/Report.aspx?i=16814&ru=%2fResults.aspx%3fp%3d1%26n%3d10%26t%3dBishop%2bAuckland%26ns%3d1

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