Lockwood Beck—As Good As Loch Katrine Water, Apparently

You can cycle the same route a hundred times, past the same stretch of hedge and stone, and see nothing. Then one day something stops you dead. That is what happened with this bridge, tucked beside the busy A171 between Guisborough and Whitby. It has the look of great age about it, and my first guess was that it once carried the old road itself over Lockwood Beck.

The maps told a different tale. Digging through the old Ordnance Survey editions, I reckon the bridge was raised by The Cleveland Water Company, back when they built Lockwood Beck Reservoir in the 1870s. The 1856 map shows the beck running well clear of the farm buildings (to the right in the photo). By 1894 the picture has changed entirely, and the culvert appears exactly where the company would have needed an outflow from their new reservoir. The bridge itself was simply the fix for the farmer suddenly cut off from his own fields by a deep new channel.

The reservoir had grand ambitions from the start. It was built to supply water to Saltburn and the district around it, and the men selling shares in the scheme were not shy about their claims. The prospectus insisted the water was of “finest quality”, and would be well adapted “for domestic, manufacturing, and Locomotive purposes”. Not content with that, they reached for the grandest comparison going, declaring it “similar to the famous Loch Katrine water”¹THE CLEVELAND WATER COMPANY,  (LIMITED.) Darlington & Richmond Herald, 28 March 1868. Page 2.

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  THE CLEVELAND WATER COMPANY,  (LIMITED.) Darlington & Richmond Herald, 28 March 1868. Page 2 ↩︎