YouTuber reveals 'weird conspiracy theory' about Shropshire's Iron Bridge
After a two-year hiatus from the weekly grind of YouTube, internet star Tom Scott returned to the small screens earlier this year with a new series simply named ‘England’.
A famous YouTuber has revealed his “unhinged conspiracy theory” about Shropshire's Iron Bridge in his latest internet series.
After a two-year hiatus from the weekly grind of YouTube, internet star Tom Scott returned to the small screens earlier this year with a new series simply named ‘England’.
The series sees Scott, who boasts more than 6.7 million subscribers, road trip through every historic English county and “film something interesting in each of them”.
So far the journey has seen the YouTuber take to the skies over Rutland, join rescue teams in imitation mines beneath Nottinghamshire and ride with the world’s smallest crewed navy in Yorkshire.
But this week’s episode has brought Scott to Shropshire, with an interesting theory about the famous Iron Bridge.
In the episode, Scott seeks to demonstrate what he calls a “slightly unhinged theory” - that the iron structure was supposed to be flat.
Today, the historic bridge spanning the mighty River Severn is surprisingly steep, measuring a one-in-eight gradient (modern accessibility standards suggest wheelchair ramps should be between one-in-twelve or one-in-twenty, depending on length).
Pointing to a suspicious absence of early designs, the uneven approach of the bridge and a long history of landslips in the area, Scott posits that the bridge was designed to be flat but changed due to the instability of the Gorge.
“I think the land settled under the new weight of iron and stone and they were lucky that the early iron construction was able to deal with it,” he said.
“I’m probably slandering someone from two centuries ago here, but if I was a senior engineer on this bridge, if I got all the plans laid out and it was meant to be almost flat, and then they put the stone in and they put the iron in and then, over the next few years, the stone slowly sank and the bridge slow rose.
“I might think it’s a bit embarrassing; I might want to get rid of those original plans that show it flat because I want people to think that it always looked like that, that’s how it was meant to be.”
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