Today you hardly notice Beetham bridge when travelling through the village.

In the early 60s it was different. There were no by-passes and no motorways – but a rapidly expanding car ownership.

The bridge was narrow, on a bend, too weak for modern heavy traffic and congestion was commonplace.

As a young graduate engineer, working under the late Ted Wray and County Surveyor Jim MacInnes, I was asked to investigate a solution for Beetham Bridge.

Westmorland County Council was a small authority providing good, cheap in-house road improvements and Beetham Bridge was a typical example.

The three span concrete bridge extension seen in the photograph was completed by the end of 1964 at a cost £17,000 (about £1m at today’s prices) and I was heavily involved.

The river Bela was realigned with an old-fashioned “drag line” excavator.

A JCB excavator, which subsequently revolutionised civil engineering construction, had just been invented and on-site trials at Beetham proved exceptionally efficient at digging foundations.

Major floods frequently interrupted building works, but in 1964 the term ‘global warming’ had not been invented.

The northern abutment was founded on concrete caissons to facilitate construction in porous but good-quality coarse gravel.

The proprietors of the adjacent paper mill expressed concern during construction about muddy water from the project gratuitously turning his production of pristine white paper bags into mottled brownish but un-commercial imitations.

Modern technology was non existent. There were no site telephones, no computers and mobile phones were still science fiction.

An example of routine communication in 1964 was when a colleague had to be rapidly dispatched by car from County Hall to tell me of the imminent birth of my first child.

I was also involved in the strengthening of Victoria, Stramongate, Miller and Nether Bridges in Kendal and other minor structures throughout the Lakes.

I subsequently continued my career on motorways in Cheshire, Warwickshire, Strathclyde and now living near Oban.

It was a satisfying career and Beetham Bridge was the first of many visible structural monuments left throughout the country