Kirkdale Bridge

Sir Samuel Hannay, a laird from Wigtonshire who had made a substantial fortune as a merchant in London, engaged Robert Adam to design Kirkdale House, and a series of other buildings on his estate at Kirkdale in the 1780s. Amongst these was a bridge to carry a road over the steep ravine of the Kirkdale Burn. Adam drew up plans for an elaborate three-span bridge, featuring swags and sphinxes, to be executed in ashlar masonry. The plans are now held by the Sir John Soane's Museum in London; the bridge as it was actually built however, around 1787, was a substantially simplified version of Adam's design, built largely of rubble and with many of the finer features missing, presumably to save…

The bridge is mostly built of rubble, but has a band course of granite ashlar. There are three spans, with round arches; the outer two arches, each spanning a footpath running along the ravine, are approximately 3.8 m wide, and the central arch over the burn itself spans 6 m. The arches have rubble voussoirs and, in the spandrels between them, rubble oculi. John R. Hume, the former chief inspector of historic buildings for Historic Scotland, describes the bridge as "distinctly plain and workmanlike, though handsomely proportioned".