Dryburgh Abbey Bridge

The bridge had been commissioned by David Stewart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, an eccentric Scottish aristocrat who later died in Dryburgh.

At the time, the cable-stayed type of bridge was undergoing a period of rapid growth in popularity.

The Earl opened the completed bridge on 1 August 1817, but in January 1818 it collapsed.

One of the designers, Thomas Smith, said of the collapse that due to "high wind increasing to [a] perfect hurricane, it carried off [the] chain bridge, leaving only the fastenings and supports, the work of half a year, demolished in an hour...."[1] After a redesign, a replacement was built, but this too collapsed in 1838, by which time the Earl had been dead for several years.

Later research in the 1930s, and experience with reconstruction after the Second World War, demonstrated that with sound design, cable-stayed bridges are not without their advantages, and the first modern design, the Strömsund Bridge in Sweden, was completed in 1955.