A stroll along the banks of the “Beautiful silvery Tay,” immortalised by William McGonagall, Scotland’s least celebrated poet—a man whose crimes against verse are beyond reproach. To dwell any longer on his literary failings would be an unnecessary indulgence, so let us leave him by the river and proceed to Aberfeldy, where we stumbled upon an elegant bridge, built by none other than General George Wade. Wade, of course, is best remembered for his ‘Military Roads’—a series of routes which can still be found printed across Ordnance Survey maps, leading one through the Highlands and into the past.
Wade himself was a figure of curious distinction. Born in Ireland in 1673, he clambered his way up the military ranks like a man scaling a cliff with too much enthusiasm and insufficient sense. By 1714, he had reached the rank of Major-General and later, because someone must have thought it amusing, Field Marshal. His involvement in the repression of the Jacobites during that ill-fated uprising drew the attention of George I’s government, which promptly dispatched him northward to report on the troublesome Scots and to find a way of persuading them to stop waving their claymores about and causing trouble.
Wade, in his infinite wisdom, deduced that the solution was simple: it was all a matter of enforcement. Parliament, full of good intentions and bad ideas, could legislate until the cows came home, but if nobody could make the Highlanders follow the law, the clans would carry on as they pleased. What was needed, Wade declared, was a system of roads and garrisons—a project of Herculean proportions that would either pacify the Highlands or bankrupt the Exchequer.
When Wade was appointed ‘Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s forces, castles, forts and barracks in North Britain,’ he wasted no time in getting to work. By 1728, he had started the construction of a road from Perth to Inverness—a feat of military engineering which, one imagines, was greeted with as much enthusiasm by the Highlanders as by the sheep. This road, now the modern-day A9, allowed government troops to march into the Highlands, armed with all the grace and subtlety of a battering ram. Barracks were flung up along the way at places like Ruthven, and by 1740, the Highlands were so tightly stitched with garrisons that any rebellious thought would be swiftly extinguished.
Bridges, of course, presented a particular challenge, both logistically and financially. Wade was not a man to be deterred by such things and saw to the construction of some forty bridges, though not without complaint from the Treasury. The most notable of these is this bridge at Aberfeldy, which was completed in 1734 at a cost of £4,000—a princely sum in those days—and spans the Tay with a grace that belies its military origins. Wade’s bridges were not just functional; they were symbols of authority, arches of civilisation spanning the turbulent waters of a land long resistant to both.
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