Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Thorne End ·
The Bridge With Two Names at Thorne End
The old footbridge at Thorne End is known by two names, one used by the village and one used by the mill, and the people who cross it say the name you call it decides which bank you come home to.
- status: rumor
The footbridge over the millrace at Thorne End is a plain stone arch, wide enough for one person and a barrow, with a low parapet and a set of worn steps at each end. The village calls it the Stile Bridge, because a wooden gate once stood at its western end and the farmers used to lean on it to talk. The mill, which closed in the sixties, called it Ferris Bridge, after the family who built the mill and then left it. Both names appear on the old maps. Both are used in the parish records. Nobody in the village has ever been able to say which name is the right one.
The rumour is that the name decides the bank.
If you cross the bridge calling it the Stile, the story goes, you come back to the village on the same side of the water you left. If you call it Ferris, you come back on the other side, the mill side, where the old race runs under the cobbles and the houses are built on stilts over the water. People who have lived on the mill side for generations say they have never been able to cross the bridge without naming it, and that they always name it Ferris, and that their children have learned to do the same.
Mrs Grace Daley, who lives on the mill side and has kept the bridge's history for the parish council, says the rumour is older than the mill. She says the first stone of the arch was laid by a man who wanted a crossing that would take his wife to the market and bring her home again, and that when she died, he cut two names into the keystone, one for each bank, because he could not decide which way she had gone.
There is a story about a boy from the Stile side who was sent across with a message for a Ferris woman, and who called the bridge Ferris by mistake, and who was never seen again on the Stile. His family searched the mill cottages for a week. They found him at last in the upper room of a house that had no door, sitting by the window, looking out over the race at the village he had left, and he told them he had been trying to cross back for three years, and that every time he reached the middle of the bridge, the other name would come into his head.
The village schoolmaster, a sceptical man who taught geography and wore a tweed suit in all weathers, once tested the rumour by crossing the bridge twice, calling it Stile on the way over and Ferris on the way back, to see whether the bank changed. He came back to the Stile side both times. He wrote the results up in a short paper for the county history society, and noted in the margin that the second crossing had taken longer, and that he had felt a faint pressure on his left shoulder, as if someone were walking beside him, matching his step.
Grace Daley still crosses the bridge every morning on her way to the post office, and she calls it by both names, quietly, one after the other, before she reaches the middle. She says it is only good manners. She says the bridge has always been fair to people who remember that a crossing has two ends.