Lydia Bridge

Grid ref: SX 6957 6066 Find this on the Map Reference Finder

Main image: River Avon at Lydia Bridge. Photograph: Derek Harper.

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River: Avon, at Aish near South Brent
Grid reference: SX 695 606
Date: probably 17th or 18th century; in decay in 1669, so the present bridge is a restoration or rebuild
Designation: Grade II, Historic England list entry 1307206 (listed 27 May 1986)

Lydia Bridge is a single humped arch in stone rubble, widened on the upstream side, probably a 17th or 18th-century packhorse bridge. It was recorded as in decay in 1669 (Henderson and Jervoise, Old Devon Bridges), so what stands now is a rebuild or restoration.

A small waterfall, Lydia's Falls, lies just upstream. Old guides send walkers from South Brent over Lydia Bridge to Aish and Didworthy, and Eden Phillpotts sets a cottage by it in Children of Men. We have found no source for the name and do not offer one.

Sources: Historic England list entry 1307206; Henderson and Jervoise, Old Devon Bridges (1938), pp 24 to 25; W. Crossing, Gems in a Granite Setting (1905).

This bridge is one of the crossings gathered in Dartmoor Bridges, a guide to the clapper bridges, packhorse bridges and road bridges of the moor and its edge.

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Prehistoric Dartmoor Walks, sites near here The Megalithic Portal, nearest recorded site

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“The atmosphere of Dartmoor deserves particular notice ; it is at all times humid. The rain, which frequently falls, almost without intermission, for many weeks together, is generally small; and resembles more a Scotch mist than a shower.”

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