The path under Gibraltar's only suspension bridge was cut so that soldiers could drag cannon up it. The bridge itself spans 71 metres over a ravine 50 metres deep, the crossing takes most people under a minute, and almost nobody crossing it knows they are standing on 18th century military engineering. The Windsor Bridge is the newest thing on the Upper Rock by about two centuries, and it was dropped into the middle of a path that was already old when it arrived. Almost everything written about it stops at the sway and the view. Here is the rest. The bridge sits on Royal Anglian Way, one of the footpaths that lace the Upper Rock. [Wikipedia's survey of the Rock's footpaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footpaths_of_Gibraltar) records that it begins near the Apes' Den, where there is a feeding station for the Barbary macaques, and runs 600 metres to a point near St Michael's Cave. The name is not decorative. The path carries the name of the Royal Anglian Regiment, whose 2nd Battalion refurbished it in 1968 and 1969, and which still maintains it with help from the Gibraltar Regiment. An English county regiment adopted a footpath on a limestone ridge in the Mediterranean and has looked after it for nearly sixty years. Under that lies something older again. The Upper Rock paths were cut from the 18th century onwards with chisels, hammers and rods driven into solid rock, for one reason: to get cannon, soldiers and supplies from sea level up to gun positions. Nobody built them for views. The views are a by product of artillery logistics. So the modern visitor attraction, the 1960s refurbishment and the Georgian engineering are all the same path. You walk all three in 600 metres. |Layer|Date|What it was for| |Original cut path|18th century onwards|Moving cannon, troops and supplies uphill| |Hayne's Cave Battery|1797|Gun position| |Rooke Battery|1907, used in the Second World War|Gun position| |Royal Anglian Way refurbishment|1968 to 1969|Keeping the route walkable| |Windsor Suspension Bridge|Opened 21 June 2016|Visitors| This is worth getting right, because the published descriptions do not match each other. The [Gibraltar Nature Reserve's own page](https://naturereserve.gi/our-rock/windsor-suspension-bridge/) says the bridge spans 70 metres over a deep ravine and is located between two Second World War artillery batteries. Nearly every other source, including the government at the opening, gives 71 metres. The footpaths survey is more specific and does not agree about the batteries. It says the 71 metre bridge connects an abandoned battery with Hayne's Cave Battery across a 50 metre ravine. Hayne's Cave Battery is a gun position established in 1797, which is not a Second World War battery by any reading. Rooke Battery, also on Royal Anglian Way, was built in 1907 and last used during the Second World War, and is the likeliest source of the wartime description. We could not find an official document naming both ends of the bridge. If you want the honest version: one end is at or beside Hayne's Cave Battery, the other is a disused emplacement, and no published source we can find names them both together. Both batteries are worth knowing about as you cross. Hayne's Cave Battery dates from 1797, in the years after the Great Siege, when the garrison was still thinking hard about where the next attack came from. Rooke Battery is 1907, built for a different century and a different enemy, and it was last used in the Second World War. The bridge links two answers to the same question, given 110 years apart. The metre of difference is trivial for a walker. We mention it because this site would rather tell you the sources conflict than pick one and sound certain. The construction story is the part that gets left out, and it is the most Gibraltarian thing about the structure. The account given consistently across Gibraltar's visitor literature is this. The work was done by Bovis Koala, a local firm, working with Muntanya, a Spanish contractor that had built similar spans in the Pyrenees. The main structure was assembled off site in Spain and brought in. The anchors were driven 12 metres into the rock face, and the design had to account for the wind that funnels through the Strait, so the bridge is flexible rather than rigid. We could not find an official government document setting any of that out, so treat it as the published account rather than the record, and the 12 metre figure in particular as reported rather than confirmed. If that account is right, and we have no reason to doubt it, the Rock's most modern visitor structure was built with cross border expertise in the middle of the decade when the frontier was the hardest political question in the territory. Nobody made a point of it at the time, which is itself telling about how much ordinary working traffic crosses that border compared with how much argument does. > A 2016 tourist attraction, bolted to a path an English regiment has maintained since 1969, following a