The arches of Dent Head Viaduct are one of the most spectacular features on the Settle-Carlisle railway. Only the traveller on the road 100ft below can appreciate one of their finer points, though, as it is hidden from view of the passengers in their Sprinter train coaches overhead enjoying views down Dentdale and across to the curlew-haunted eminencies of Rise Hill and Baugh Fell.
At the base of the huge viaduct piers carved from monolithic blocks of Dent marble so beloved of Adam Sedgwick – said to be the founder of modern geology and Dent's most famous son – is a tiny bridge intended to carry packhorses loaded with panniers across a stream. It was here inspecting his handiwork I chanced on stone-mason Pete Roe from Swaledale who appears to have a similar feel for bedrock as did Prof Sedgwick. In recent years he restored this packhorse bridge that had been within a blink of an eyelid of tumbling into the stream below, and taking the strip of emerald green turf cloaking its span down with it.
Just four miles away from Dent station, Britain's highest mainline station at 600ft higher than the Dickensian cobbled streets of Dent village, here is a setting of perfect isolation, now suffused with the luminescent greenery of spring. Roe, a rangy six-footer well versed in restoring fallen arches, had to perform open heart surgery here by cutting a gaping hole into the centre of the ancient arch and replacing its key stones from above – while hoping the weakened structure would take his weight.
How the span trembled and quivered, now deprived of much of the tension that had helped support it before the removal of the stones. He could even sense it shivering as freight trains rumbled overhead, a problem those original craftsman who had built the tiny span perhaps 300 years earlier could never have contemplated.