Storms Tear Out the Heart of Tarr Steps, Britain's Longest Clapper Bridge

Storms Austen and Boelo have torn out the central section of Tarr Steps, the longest clapper bridge in Britain. Sara Hudston, writing the Guardian's country diary from Exmoor, visited the River Barle a week after the floods and found the middle of the ancient crossing gone, with massive rock slabs jumbled across the riverbed, "their rough-hewn ends poking up like the heads of crude dinosaur models."

The numbers behind the damage are stark. More than eight centimetres of rain fell overnight, and the river rose by nearly two metres. Heaps of fallen trees swept downstream caught against the bank; torn branches smashed and wedged into the remaining piers. Bridge and ford are now closed for the immediate future.

What has been lost?

Tarr Steps is a near-55-metre footbridge with 17 arches braced across the Barle. Its pillars are piled rock set roughly two metres apart, spanned by flat gritstone slabs weighing up to two tonnes each. Nothing binds the structure except bulk and weight: no mortar, no cement, no ironwork.

Its exact age is uncertain. The existing structure is considered a medieval improvement of a simpler Bronze Age crossing. That heritage has not protected it from weather. The most dramatic previous destruction came in the ice floods of January 1940, when the river froze solid, then melted rapidly, releasing ice floes into a torrent that battered out the central section.

Why does this keep happening?

Damage has become more frequent this century. Floodwater has dismantled the bridge five times in the last nine years, most recently during storms Austen and Boelo. Hudston's account does not attribute the pattern to a specific cause, and readers should note the piece stops short of drawing a climate conclusion — it reports frequency, not attribution.

The walk down to the river carried its own signals of change. A red kite wheeled overhead, its dull copper underparts matching autumn leaves still clinging to the oaks. Red kites remain fairly uncommon on Exmoor, though numbers have increased as the species pushes west. Pheasants, whirring past in alarm, are also more numerous — a consequence, Hudston writes, of the spread of game-shooting estates.

What happens next?

Reconstruction will not be quick. With winter coming on, Hudston reports, it will be some time before the blocks — all numbered — can be hauled back into place. The numbering system means the original stones can be returned to their positions rather than replaced, a repair method that preserves the fabric but depends on dry conditions and low water.

What does this change for the bridge? In one sense, nothing: Tarr Steps has been washed away before, most catastrophically in 1940, and rebuilt each time. In another sense, everything: a crossing that survived from the Bronze Age through the medieval period has now failed five times in under a decade, and each rebuild is a bet on calmer weather ahead.