Helsby

One day Damian set out on a trip round his home village to see what bridges there were. Then he got lost. Unfortunately, and much to the disappointment of his family, he found his way home again.

This is the sign that greets you as you enter the village. This one is located at the rubbishy Frodsham-side, the one at the 'good' end of the village allows you to see the 'iron age village' writing below the main 'HELSBY'. From my extensive research, it seems that Helsby has only done one thing ever that it's proud of.

Yes, 6 years ago it was crowned 'most improved village', so the people of the village decided to plaster this sign everywhere they could. What they failed to realise when doing this, is that what the sign actually says to people is 'this village was a dump in 1998'. It may or may not be relevant that 1999 is also the year that I moved away to uni.

With that little introduction over, I shall move onto the important business of the bridges. There's quite a few in Helsby, it turned out, and no good route to view them all without going back on yourself at some point.

This is the first bridge I came across on the Sunday afternoon I set out on my trip. Crossing over it from this direction and the road after it looks very much, I've always thought, of a place in Devon. It always used to confuse me when I was on going on holiday because after driving for hours and hours on the motorway, it would seem that we'd just gone in a big circle and had now arrived back home.

No idea what goes across the top of this bridge. I attempted to climb up the wall and peer over the top, but without success. It is very important to take care when driving down this section of road at night, as the high walls and bridge make this area very dark. Combine the fact that the road is only wide enough to allow one car to pass, and the risk of crashing into something is really quite high.

Within minutes of meeting my dad off the train from Birmingham on the Friday, he was telling me of how that evening the new foot bridge was being put up outside my old school (Helsby High School, if anyone cares, which has now got itself some kind of special science label. I am really tempted to rant about how much I hate one of the senior staff at this point, but that has little to do with bridges so I'll put it off for now). Obviously, I was really excited about seeing this event, and was busy figuring out how to work the video option on my camera, when my parents decided that they didn't want to see a bridge erected so wouldn't take me.

Whilst I was devastated at the time, come Sunday morning when I came to inspect the new bridge, I was confronted with the above scene. No new bridge. I have no idea where its gotten to and, unless they were putting it up Sunday night, there's probably a few dead kids on the road now (the school having reopened after the summer).

Whilst at school, the evil* Dennis Evans made us run (well, he attempted to make us do the running bit, but mostly I just went for a stroll) something known as 'the double loop'. A section of this meant going down a 'path' affectionately known as Sunken Lane. Why was it sunken?

Well, to the right of the path as shown above, theres a little stream. I say 'little' but after a minimum amount of rain the path is absorbed into the stream and becomes a giant raging river. Down this we were forced to run.

Why am I telling you this? Because of this bridge at the end of the lane. The bridge that signals the turning off point if you were going to run 'The Tree'. And it's at this point where my bridge-seeing trip went downhill.

I went to check out The Tree route because it leads up Helsby Hill, the top of which would give me a good view of the surrounding area and, hopefully, allow be to get some shots of bridges in Frodsham without actually having to walk there (its a reasonable distance from home). The Tree is so called because there's a giant tree which signals the turning round point (or the beginning of 'The Ladder'). I'd been walking for a while. No sign of the tree or The Ladder route. As far as I knew there was no horizontal route beyond the tree so I mustn't have reached it yet. I continued walking. Then I got to here...

To those who left us to read about Frodsham, welcome back. To everyone else, um, hi. Let's continue...

Since I'd been walking for about 3 hours now in the midday sun and really, really wanted to get home and have a drink, I couldn't be bothered taking a detour from the main road to get a better picture of this bridge. It's the bridge crossing the railway line at Helsby station. As far as I know I've only ever used this station twice (once to get to Liverpool, and then again on the way back), and probably only the bridge once.

Here it is: the Last Bridge I Could Be Bothered Walking To. Unfortunately, I don't think this bridge actually crosses anything, so it's probably not even a real bridge. It's just a big bump in the road.

If you peer off the left hand side you see a load of vegetation, which covers whatever original use this bridge had, and off the right hand side you see this:

Yes, it's a giant Tesco. Why is there a giant Tesco in a village with no banks, no building societies, a post office that keeps being threated with closure, and pretty much nothing else except a (once) decent school? I do not know. I assume someone saw the area of empty space and thought 'let's stick a giant supermarket there!'. So here it is. It's not open yet so I can't tell you anything else about it. I just thought it was a bit crazy to be built here. Oh well.

*may not actually be evil

- Damian, September 2005

uk europe world