Come stroll with me…

…across the river Loire…

I bet that's got you thinking!  I'm not going to attempt to walk on water, I'll just get wet!  But I am going to take you to the lovely town of Briare in central France in the département of Loiret.  With a population of around 6,000 it is a small town with a long history.  It was called Brivodorum when those pesky Romans were here.  As much as I would like to treat you to some of the interesting places in town, what I'm actually here for is an amazing piece of engineering.

Briare sits on the east bank of the Loire which is one of the 5 great fleuves of France, the other four being the Rhine, Rhône, Seine and the Garonne.  It's a pleasant stroll from the centre of town, along rue de St-Firmin to the river and the harbour with moorings for pleasure craft.  If you prefer to ride to the harbour, there is a petit train during the tourist season that will bring you to the same spot.

Once here you cannot escape the spectacle that is the aqueduct that carries the canal latéral à la Loire over the river.

The viaduct was completed in 1896 and replaced an earlier river crossing that could be dangerous during times of flooding.  Made of steel set above masonry abutments and piers, it was formally opened on September 16^th, 1896.  At 662 meters - that's 2,172 feet in length if you prefer - it was, until 2003, the longest navigable aqueduct in the world.  At least that's what my guidebook tells me.  Standing here and watching the boats come and go you have to admire the achievement.  And, if there are a few things about the bridge that seem a little familiar, that may be because one of the great and the good who created this piece of engineering was Gustave Eiffel.  Yep, that's him, the man who built the Eiffel tower and quite a few other bits of metal in and around France before he died in 1923 at the age of 91.  Eiffel founded his construction company 1866, which still exists today and has been involved in massive projects such as the Millau viaduct (2002) and the Normandy Bridge (1995).  And what is it that might seem so familiar?  The ornamental columns that mark each end of the crossing echo the pillars of the Pont Alexandre III in Paris.

To give you some idea of the enormity of the task to create the aqueduct, the channel is 2.2 meters deep, that's just over 7 feet.  It carries about 13,000 tonnes of water and has 8 sluices which means it can be completely emptied if necessary - not sure I'd want to be here when they did that!.  Now, I'm one of those people who is not that good with numbers or abstract measurements of space.  So, a metric tonne, kind of means nothing to me.  I need to drill it down to something I can visualise.  If all that 13,000 metric tonnes of water water were converted into bottles of wine, it would come to 17,334… And, when you come to think about it, that's one seriously large shed-load of wine!

If you want to read about more about my travels in France, you may wish to join me in Falaise   Bar-sur-Seine  or in the  Cévennes