THOMAS TELFORD

Thomas Telford was influential throughout the UK during the industrial revolution. He was the son of a shepherd who died before he was born in Dumfriesshire in 1757. He became an apprentice stonemason in Langholm, and by 1780 he was working in Edinburgh on the expansion of the Old Town meeting with Adam and was soon introduced to London. After working on London’s famous Somerset House he studied and became an engineer whilst constantly extending his knowledge of the arts. His Engineering projects cover the length and breadth of the country, including Portsmouth Docks, The Menai Bridge to Anglesey, and the highest and longest iron aqueduct at Pontcysyllte carrying the Llangollen Canal, major trunk roads such as the A5 to Holyhead. Adding Architecture and Town Planning and he was constantly bringing together the new technologies of the industrial revolution.

In Scotland, he designed Ullapool in 1788, but on land south of the River Wick acquired in 1803, he designed a model town, Pulteneytown, his greatest work in Town Planning, based on the classical principals of Bath and predating Edinburgh’s New Town. This was a town of the Industrial Age including the world’s first industrial estate catering for all the industries required to support the Herring Fisheries, Foundries, Sawmills, Town Gas and Light Company, Coopers, Curing Yards, quarries, flour mill, brewery, distillery, rope works, sail makers and boat builders, but this was also a town of the Enlightenment with the fine terraces on Breadalbane Terrace and formal layout of Argyll Square. The Far North Telford Trail may start from the magnificent Caledonian Canal, that links Corpach in the West with Inverness along the Great Glen and leads North to Pulteneytown which was built before the road. The Causeway at Loch Fleet being just part of the 920 miles and 120 bridges constructed in the Highlands as a result of his early 19^th century roads’ survey.