The Valley As A Boundary
In earlier centuries the river Lea and its marshland formed a natural boundary between the historic areas of Middlesex and Essex, some 2 km wide and 20 km long. The river was crossed at several points by fords or ferries, which were eventually replaced by bridges. At Stratford a stone causeway on the Roman road to Colchester was supplemented by bridge in 1100. In 1745 the valley was crossed at Clapton by Lea Bridge. In 1810 an iron bridge was built linking East India Dock Road. In the late 1920s the Lea Valley Viaduct, carrying the North Circular Road, was built to a design by Owen Williams. This was replaced in the 1980s.
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Famous quotes containing the words valley and/or boundary:
“I see before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)