THE widening of the A1(M) through North Yorkshire means that many motorists have finally mastered the cruise control function on their cars as they desperately try to stay within the 50mph limit that is being policed by the average speed cameras.

The first stretch of A1 to be built was the three-and-a-half-miles of the Catterick bypass, which were constructed between 1959 and 1959 – our picture today comes courtesy of the Armstrong Railway Photographic Trust and shows the beginnings of the bridge over the Swale. We reckon the photographer is standing on the south bank looking north, with the first of the Brompton overbridges in the distance.

The by-pass cost £1.06m and was the first major upgrade of the A1 in North Yorkshire after the war. It was opened in November 1959 by Lord Chesham, who was the Joint Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Transport, and a motoring enthusiast.

The Swale bridge is being widened by the current project, but its sister bridge – Fort Bridge – came crashing down a couple of weekends ago. Fort Bridge, which was a couple of hundred yards south of the Swale bridge, was both a road and a rail bridge.

It carried the A6136 road and the Catterick Military Railway over the new motorway and into the army camp. The two ran side by side until passenger traffic on the railway ceased in 1964 and the tracks were removed in 1970.

Fort Bridge put up a good fight against the demolition crew – the A1 beneath was due to be shut for 34 hours while it was removed, but the overnight work over-ran by 90 minutes, so when it did open at 7.30am on Monday, November 16, an impressive queue had built up. It is to be hoped that they all moved off at an orderly 50mph.

IT was fascinating to see in last week’s paper that Prospect House in Ripon was for sale for £1.45m. It was built in 1835 for the Kearsley family who made their money by helping Ripon to become Britain’s first – and possibly only – “city of varnish”.

In 1775, Ripon banker Daniel Williamson befriended a French Huguenot refugee who had arrived seeking sanctuary from religious persecution on the Continent. He brought with him a secret recipe for varnish – a strange concoction of gums, resins, oils and glues – which he divulged in gratitude at Daniel’s kindliness.

Soon, Ripon was the “city of varnish”, with companies like Kearsley’s specialising in hard-wearing coatings for locomotives.

Today, Williamson’s survives as the country’s oldest varnish house although Ripon’s lustre as a city of varnish has faded a little.

ANOTHER line of enquiry recently in Looking Back has been about Bedale Isolation Hospital, which was a little tin affair that was costing so much for the local council to run in 1915 that the councillors were hoping people with tuberculosis could be persuaded to be nursed at home – after all, said the councillors, it wouldn’t cost the victims’ families very much as all they were allowed to consume for the first fortnight as they fought the disease was a little milk.

A lady called, but left an incorrect number, and said that her father had known the hospital as the “pink fever hospital” and it had been near a quarry on the B6268 road out to Masham.

The Ordnance Survey map notes several old quarries on this road, including one called Gybdykes, which is a fine collection of letters. The map also says that this road is called “Scroggs Lane”, but who, or what, is a scrogg?