A River Runs Through It
FOLLOW THE WINDING ROAD from Durham Cathedral, a 900-year-old architectural masterpiece that dominates the skyline of this historic city in northeast England, and you’ll eventually reach a narrow, cobbled twelfth-century stone bridge. Known as Elvet Bridge, it stands 20 feet above the River Wear. When it was the main thoroughfare in and out of the city, the bridge was also the prime spot for merchants to sell their wares. If you happened to have crossed it in 1650 or so, you might have stopped at one of many wooden market stalls to choose some new coat buttons, seek out a remedy for an ailment, or perhaps treat yourself to a hair comb. The bridge was only 16 feet across then—just wide enough for a horse and carriage—and, as a result, many traders built wooden booths overhanging the side of the bridge to store and display their wares. For at least one unfortunate trader, this precarious arrangement ended in disaster. A seventeenth-century account tells of a market hut on Elvet Bridge collapsing and falling into the river one night, its stock lost forever.
Or perhaps not quite forever. More than 400 years later, Gary Bankhead, an adventurous firefighter and keen diver, acquired permission to explore the riverbed underneath Elvet Bridge. Over the last nine years, Bankhead, who is now an honorary research associate at Durham University, has recovered thousands of objects from the River Wear that span a period of more than 800 years. The collection includes pilgrims’ ampullas, or small lead flasks filled with holy water, and seals attached to once-colorful
