If it caters only for cars, the new Forth bridge is a road to nowhere

One morning in the summer of 1961 I walked from my house over the hill and down a green slope - a steep path through the grass and bracken - to a Victorian villa that had recently been taken over as offices by a firm of civil engineers. There, on that day, I got my first job. For the duration of the school summer holidays I was to be a chainman, a bag-carrier and hammer-wielder for the surveyors who were planning the approach roads to the new Forth road bridge. Some of the work was pleasant. In an old bedroom, I learned to operate a machine that copied technical drawings. Outside in the sun, I carried theodolites on surveying trips and held up the pole from which a surveyor, waving in the distance, would take his elevations. But other work was hard. Tall staves often needed driving into unyielding ground with sledgehammers. The surveyors, many of whom had learned their craft down Fife's coal mines, would tell me I was useless and do it themselves.

All around me, the landscape I'd grown up with was disappearing. Building the Forth road bridge was "the largest Scottish engineering project of the century". When it had begun three years earlier, people in the village had hardly noticed. A few buildings directly in the bridge's alignment had been vacated, including a farmhouse and another villa, this one at the sea's edge, where as a roving 13-year-old I found a pair of abandoned white spats in the drawing room and hard grapes growing in a cold, untended greenhouse. But now change was in full roar. Cuttings wide enough to fit four carriageways were driven through rock as earth-movers shaped embankments of fresh brown earth. Two 500-foot towers rose above the firth, soon to have steel cables suspended from them, spun on site from 30,000 miles of wire. All of this was happening noisily only several hundred yards from where we lived, but I can't remember protest or complaint. The idea of unchanging rurality is an urban fiction. Our village, North Queensferry, had been changing dramatically for a hundred years, its hills eaten into by whinstone quarries and wartime gun batteries, its houses shadowed by the great Forth railway bridge, which since 1890 had been proclaimed the world's eighth wonder: "The labour of 5,000 men (night and day) for seven years" as the postcards said in the village shop.