Scammonden Bridge

Scammonden Bridge
View east towards the reservoir
Coordinates	53°38′52″N 1°55′52″W / 53.6477°N 1.9310°W / 53.6477; -1.9310
Carries	B6144 road
Crosses	M62 motorway
Locale	Kirklees
Maintained by	National Highways
Characteristics
Design	Open spandrel fixed-arch
Material	Reinforced concrete
Total length	656 ft (200 m)
Width	24 ft (7.3 m)
Height	120 ft (37 m)
Longest span	410 ft (120 m)
No. of spans	1
History
Designer	Colonel Stuart Maynard Lovell
Constructed by	Sir Alfred McAlpine
Construction start	January 1967
Opened	18 May 1970
Inaugurated	14 October 1971
Location

Scammonden Bridge, also known locally as the Brown Cow Bridge (after the nearby Brown Cow Inn, now closed), spans the Deanhead cutting carrying the B6114 (the former A6025) Elland to Buckstones road over the M62 motorway in Kirklees, West Yorkshire, England. The bridge and Scammonden Reservoir to the west are named after Scammonden, the village that was flooded to accommodate the reservoir whose dam carries the motorway. On opening, the bridge was the longest concrete arch bridge in the UK.^[1]

The bridge was built for the West Riding County Council to the designs of the county surveyor, Colonel S. Maynard Lovell. In March 1962 a model of the 37-mile (60 km) section of the M62 was displayed in Wakefield, the administrative centre of the West Riding County Council. The route of the motorway, from the A572 to the A640 at Huddersfield, was announced by Tom Fraser on 29 October 1964.

On opening, it was believed to be one of the largest concrete single spans in Europe.

The bridge had high winds; pedestrians found it sometimes hard to walk along it, so a new type of road sign, for high winds, was installed.^[2]

The £8m contract was given in late October 1966.^[3]

The bridge was planned as a flat arch bridge, but aerodynamic considerations led to an open spandrel design.^[4] The main span supports eight spandrel columns and there are four other columns over the motorway cutting. The spandrel columns are 18 inches (46 cm) thick.^[5]

The arch is a twin box section. Its deck is an inverted T-type pretensioned prestressed concrete beam. The bridge deck is 24 feet (7.3 m) wide. Using computers, its design was calculated to withstand 110 mph (180 km/h; 49 m/s) winds, and was tested in wind tunnels at the University of Nottingham and the National Physical Laboratory.^[6] The motorway cutting was profiled with 15-foot (4.6 m) 'steps'.

The road it carried was the A6025, but is now the B6114 between Elland and the A640 junction at Buckstones Moss. To the west of the bridge the M62 enters Calderdale from Kirklees; the boundary crosses the B6114 north of the bridge, and follows the north side of the M62 along Scammonden Water. The road crosses the M62 at around 1,017 feet (310 m) above sea level, northeast of Cow Gate Hill.

It opened to traffic on Monday 18 May 1970 by Major Bruce Eccles. Huddersfield Transport ran buses to see the bridge.

In 2020 work was carried out to erect permanent, 8 feet (2.4 m) high, inward curving anti-climb fencing on both sides of the bridge, following a number of deaths, in order to prevent suicides.^[7] Work began in June, nearly a year after Highways England confirmed they had secured the £1m required to design and build the new structures. The scheme was completed in October 2020.^[8]

The arch is made of modular precast concrete sections, weighing 9,000 tonnes (8,900 long tons). The construction contractor was Alfred McAlpine. Construction of the arch required 70 miles (110 km) of scaffolding tubing. During the winter there was severe ice build up on the scaffolding.

A fifty ton drilling rig began construction in early January 1967. Explosions would move 200 tons of rock, at a time. There was heavy rain in the middle of May 1967.^[9] 38 Ruston-Bucyrus excavators worked on the project; McAlpine had bought 23 excavators in March 1967 for £400,000. It was the largest single excavation for a British motorway.^[10] Gravel came from Scout Quarry at Edenfield in Lancashire.^[11]

It was deepest motorway excavation in Europe.^[12] Richard Marsh, Baron Marsh, the transport minister, visited on Friday 2 May 1969.^[13][14] Many sightseers came to see the bridge being built, often at weekends.

Excavation of the Deanhead cutting was done using explosives; 12,000,000 cubic yards were excavated.^[15] The cutting is 150 feet (46 m) deep, 2,600 feet (790 m) long, and 4.6 million cubic yards (3,500,000 m³) of earth was removed during its construction. Most of it was used to build the 249-foot (76 m) high Scammonden Dam across the Black Brook valley, which was the first motorway-dam project in the world.

The route of the carriageway was set out in July 1963 and the motorway cutting began work in August 1964.^[16] Work on the six-mile Windy Hill to Pole Moor section began on 1 November 1966 and was carried out for 12 hours on weekdays and eight hours at weekends.

• List of bridges in the United Kingdom
• List of longest arch bridge spans
• List of longest masonry arch bridge spans

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Scammonden Bridge.

• CBRD
• Motorway Archive
• SABRE Roads
• A6025
• Bridge construction
• Construction

• Construction
• Sunset timelapse from the bridge
• View from the east along the M62
• View from the west
• View from the top