A5 Watling Street - Limekiln Bridge

Wonderful wonderful discovery on the Leicestershire canal and road network. I didn’t expect to find such a beautiful concrete structure here and it makes the bridge and its location all the more significant. If you’re on the canal and heading towards Hinckley, this bridge is the first structure you’ll meet inside the county of Leicestershire, making it a boundary defining feature. Carrying the A5 Watling Street, once a strategic Roman Road now a major truck road the line it cuts in the map along this stretch defines the Warwickshire/Leicestershire border. And the concrete, oh joy the concrete, with an aesthetic so redolent of the Sir Owen Williams structures on the M1 (a modern forebear of Watling Street) an art deco artefact still proudly fulfilling the role it was intended for all these years on. And as if it wasn’t good enough already the site is a former lime kiln intersecting upon many layers of heritage, this bridge calcifying so many connections, its concrete an aggregate of that history.