Truly a bridge to make you sigh

The 200 feet deep channels were fast running and when the tide came in the water rose precipitously. Then there was the wind which, when it blew like Satchmo, could pluck the hairs from your head. Nor did the location at Queensferry make life any easier for the engineers. Because the Forth was a major seaway, it was impossible to erect scaffolding. This called for ingenuity and imagination, not to mention the kind of courage possessed only by those who take a stroll across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. "I speak of men," said Sir Benjamin Baker, the bridge's English co-designer, "working with precarious foothold at dizzy heights in stormy weather."

Having said all of which, as the late Charles McKean noted in Battle for the North, an enthralling account of bridge-building and railway expansion in the late nineteenth century, it is misleading to think that those who chose the Forth Bridge design did so because of its striking appearance. The truth, as McKean suggests, was much less romantic. They opted for the emblematic design, which was recently awarded Unesco World Heritage Status - prompting Network Rail to plan a controversial visitor attraction - because it was the cheapest. The cost was estimated at just over £1.5 million.

When it was completed people flocked from far and near to gawp. Not all of them, however, were impressed. The master-craftsman William Morris raged: "Every improvement in the art of engineering made the use of iron more ugly, until at last they had that supreme specimen of ugliness, the Forth Bridge." Time, however, has shown Morris and his ilk to be wrong. The bridge is beautiful and elegant and a wonder to behold. As I cross on regular forays into Fife and beyond I often think of how the novelist Iain Banks, who lived in the bridge's lea, described it: "In cross-section, at its thickest, the bridge resembles the letter A; the train deck forms the cross-bar of the A. In elevation, the centre part of each section consists of an H superimposed over an X; spreading out on each side from the centre are six more Xs which gradually reduce in size until they meet the slender linking spans (which have nine small Xs each). Linking the extremities of each X, one to another, then produces a reasonable silhouette of the general shape: hey presto! The bridge!"

It was opened in 1890 and 74 years later it acquired a neighbour, the road bridge. I was there to witness its unveiling by the Queen. It too is a triumph of industry and invention, of dreams realised. Like its predecessor, it owed much to the land across which it sprawls. The wire, for example, that holds it up was manufactured in Brunton's mill in Musselburgh which I used to pass daily on my route to secondary school. It was testimony to what this small nation could do when it put its mind to it, when a challenge was issued. But that mill has long gone. In its stead stands a 24/7 Tesco.

We don't make wire any more. Nor, it seems, do we make much else. "The road bridge across the Forth," writes George Rosie in a revelatory essay in the most recent issue of the Scottish Review of Books, "was a thoroughly British - and largely Scottish - affair." The same could be said of its predecessor. But the same, sadly, cannot be said of the new road bridge which is emerging - on time and on budget - from the gun-metal grey waters. Known as the Queensferry Crossing, it will be an aesthetic rival to its counterparts and soon it will convey 70,000 cars every day to and from the capital. But what it will not be, as Rosie acknowledges, is a "triumph of Scottish engineering". Our contribution has been minimal, not to say pathetic. All the main companies hail from elsewhere, from places where making and building things still matters. Even the sub-contractors are not based here. What used to be our business is now consigned to history and heritage.