Kilgram Bridge: The historic Yorkshire bridge which was built by the devil according to local legend

The ford carried a road between a camp on what’s now known as Camp Hill, Grewelthorpe, and the Roman garrison at Catterick.

Local legend has it the bridge was built by the devil.

That stretch of the Ure was notorious for flooding, the story goes, and the devil agreed to build an indestructible bridge but in return the soul of the first person to cross it when completed would belong to him.

However, a stone from the parapet was removed, rendering the bridge unfinished, and the devil did not win his prize.

It is believed that the Cistercian monks who founded nearby Jervaulx Abbey between Masham and Leyburn in the 1150s were responsible for constructing Kilgram Bridge.

This may have been to link the abbey to a road north to Richmond Castle in Swaledale, which had been constructed after 1071 by the Breton nobleman and follower of William the Conqueror, Alan Rufus.

The abbey is known to have had a grange - an outlying farm - just south of the bridge.

It is 130ft (4m) in length and 15ft (4.6m) wide and has six arches with three piers standing in the River Ure.

There are records of the bridge requiring repairs in Elizabethan times and again in the 17th century.

During a devastating cattle plague in the 18th century a 24-hour guard was put in place lest farmers attempted to move herds from one side of the Ure to the other.