By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

too. I wonder if the sound of the buzz alters in proportion to the excitement?

      The bee-dancing hypothesis was received with considerable scepticism at first. Later observations showed that the time it took for bees to arrive at the source was usually longer than von Frisch had predicted. Maybe it was all a mixture of chance, sight, and scent after all? But in 2005 a research team made more precise measurements to show that von Frisch’s dancing theory was right.

      They used a method called harmonic radar – a system first used to track the location of avalanche victims. A tiny transponder was attached to a bee, and this returned radar signals enabling its flight path to be plotted. The team was able to demonstrate that the waggle dance was enough to enable most of the bees to reach the vicinity of the food. But they then needed sight and odour to pinpoint the final destination.

      That was why von Frisch’s bees took longer than expected to reach the food. The dance got them to the railway station, as it were, but they had to find the right platform for themselves.

      The busload of Japanese tourists had found their way onto the station platform and had lined up under the name sign. They were having trouble working out how to stand in front of it without obscuring the letters. The photographer was having trouble too, getting everybody into his shot. He backed away, momentarily forgetting that the railway line was right behind him. An eruption of Japanese – which, roughly translated, said, ‘Excuse our temerity in troubling you, Hiro, but you are about to fall onto a railway track and there is a train coming’– kept him safe.

      After the train had passed he solved his problem by taking the photograph from the opposite platform. And his subjects solved theirs by having some of their party sit down on the ground in front of the name sign. It looked as if the letters were sprouting out of their heads.

      Suddenly the jam cleared, and I drove on, leaving the sheep and Japanese behind. The road out of Llanfairpwll runs alongside the Menai Straits, and if you pull into a lay-by there is a splendid view of the two bridges – Thomas Telford’s fine Menai Suspension Bridge to the north, and the later Britannia Bridge, originally built by Robert Stephenson, a mile and a half to the south.

      The suspension bridge was opened on 30 January 1826. It was one of the highest bridges of its day, because the Admiralty insisted that there should be room beneath it to allow the passage of sailing ships. It’s a hundred-foot drop to the water below. It carried the A5 from London to Holyhead – the first British road instituted by an Act of Parliament. The Irish Act of Union had been passed in 1801. Once the link was completed, Irish MPs would be able to make the journey down to the Houses of Parliament in two days instead of four.

      Before the bridge there were only ferries – six main services, running at different points along the Straits, each under the control of a local landowner. A highly competitive business it was, I suppose much like the local taxi businesses in the area today. Apart from the time involved, and the danger from the strong currents, it could be expensive. Who pays the ferryman? You did – and sometimes twice! Some boatmen would charge you when you got onto the boat, and then charge you again before they let you off.

      The ferry owners were totally against the project, but they were overruled by London, and work started on the bridge in 1819. Limestone was quarried at Penmon a few miles north, and carried down by boat. The ironwork was made at a Shrewsbury foundry. To prevent rust, it was immersed in warm linseed oil.

      Lewis Carroll had a different idea. In Chapter 8 of Through the Looking Glass he has the White Knight come up with a unique preservation scheme. The Knight has been singing a song to Alice about the life-story told to him by ‘an aged, aged man, a-sitting on a gate’. Then, quite out of the blue, he reflects:

      I heard him then, for I had just

      Completed my design

      To keep the Menai Bridge from rust

      By boiling it in wine.

      A-sitting. That use of a-goes back to the Middle Ages. It is historically a form of on, which came to be used to emphasize the duration of an action, and especially its repeated character. If you were ‘a-shouting’, as Casca says the people do at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, you would be engaged in that activity for longer than if you were just ‘shouting’. You would be shouting over and over.

      Why does Carroll use it here? Sitting isn’t a verb which needs an a- prefix. It is already expressing a continuous duration. The aged man wasn’t sitting repeatedly on his gate. So you wouldn’t expect to find an a-used.

      What happened was that poets started to use the prefix to make up the ‘te-tum-te-tum’ rhythm of a line. It was a bit cheeky, really, but the nuance added by a- was so slight that it hardly made any difference. And it was an easy ‘fix’.

      The stratagem was a boon to anyone making up simple rhymes:

       Bye, baby bunting. Daddy’s gone hunting.

       Doesn’t work.

       Bye, baby bunting. Daddy’s gone a-hunting.

      Works.

      So, ‘A-hunting we will go…’, ‘Here we come a-wassailing…’– and ‘an aged, aged man, a-sitting on a gate’.

      That day in June 2005, as I passed by, they were preserving the bridge again, but totally ignoring Carroll’s advice, for there was no wine in sight. They were three months into the painstaking task of stripping off the old paint down to the bare metal and repainting. It would take them several months to finish, and in the meantime one side of the bridge was covered with scaffolding. Only one lane of the bridge was open. In the morning it took the traffic across from Anglesey to the mainland, and then at 2 p.m. the flow reversed. Hard luck if you arrived at the Anglesey side at one minute past two. You had to find another way – or wait a day, of course.

      Fortunately, there is another way. Just a few years after Telford’s bridge was opened, plans were drawn up by Robert Stephenson for a bridge to carry the London–Holyhead railway across the Straits. To take the weight of a train, he designed a bridge consisting of two rectangular wrought-iron tubes, ten feet apart, one of which enclosed the up-line and the other the down-line. A protective wooden roof was added, covered with hessian and coated with tar, along the whole length of the bridge. There was a gap of a couple of feet between the roof and the top of the tubes.

      The tubes were 150 feet above the water, supported by five tall masonry towers, again using Penmon limestone. Each tower was surmounted by a stone structure, which gave the bridge a distinctive fort-like silhouette. Four limestone lions, about thirteen feet in height, guarded the bridge, two at each end. They were carved by John Thomas, who had previously worked at the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.

      Would the tubes take the weight of a train? To be on the safe side, Stephenson allowed for suspension chains in his design, and put slots into the top of the arches above the bridge. But it proved to be an unnecessary precaution. A model of the bridge was built and tested, and the tubular construction went ahead without chains. The bridge was opened on 5 March 1850, and trains passed comfortably to and fro for 120 years. The slots now look rather ominous as you approach them – like pairs of beady eyes.

      I remember travelling by steam train through the bridge in the 1950s, to and from Holyhead. If the window of your compartment was open – and as a child you tried to make sure it was – you would soon be covered with wonderful smoke and ash, and your ears would ring with the whistle of the engine as it entered the tunnel and the deafening noise of the train in the confined space.

      Then, on the evening of Saturday, 23 May 1970, the bridge burned down. A group of local teenagers had gone into the tunnel on the Caernarfonshire side to see what it was like, and lit some paper for illumination a few yards inside. They dropped it accidentally, and other rubbish alongside the track caught fire. The mixture of wood, hessian, and tar, and the draught tunnel formed by the roof space, did the rest.

      The problem