Ossian Collection > Journal of a tour in Scotland in

INTRODUCTION xi
watches climbing and descending with him
through a great part of his course. These
canal and road works, and numerous bridges
and harbour works, were being carried out in
the North of Scotland when Telford, in the
summer of 1819, took what was in fact
primarily a tour of inspection. The Cale-
donian Canal was opened three years later.
For its creator, as for Southey, the year
after their return had important things in
store. But while to the poet laureate it
brought the chief and most enduring literary
disaster of his life, to Telford it brought his
most brilliant and universally known engineer-
ing feat. In 1820 the Menai Suspension
Bridge was begun, and the most difficult
link in the great mail road from London to
Holyhead, of a then unexampled span, was
thus successfully forged. Works of engineer-
ing are subject in general to a greater danger
of depreciation by the progress of scientific
invention than are works of literature by
changes of literary fashion. But in spite of
the huge handicap of the introduction, almost
on the morrow of this journey, of steam
locomotion, the bridges and roads of Telford
are far less touched with the blight of
obsolescence than the essays and epics of