The Bridge

On one side of the river Teifi, there is a village called Llanfair Uchaf. On the other side, there is a village called Llanfair Isaf. They are only three hundred meters apart, but for as long as anyone can remember, the two villages have not gotten along.

Nobody knows exactly when they fell out. Some people say it was over a stolen pig in 1782. Others say it was a rugby match in 1923. Whatever the reason, the people of Uchaf and Isaf have been putting up with each other for centuries. They have separate pubs, separate choirs and separate football teams, and every summer they hold separate festivals on the same weekend, just to annoy each other.

The only thing they shared was the old stone bridge. Every morning the children of Uchaf crossed it to go to the school in Isaf, and every afternoon the people of Isaf crossed it to buy bread at the bakery in Uchaf. Nobody said hello on the bridge. It was a rule that nobody had written down, but everybody followed.

Then, one stormy night in February, after a week of heavy rain, the river rose higher than anyone had ever seen, and the old bridge fell down. In the morning, the two villages stood on opposite banks and looked at the broken stones in the brown water.

The council said a new bridge would take three years. The detour by road was forty minutes. Children missed school, the bakery lost half its customers, and the old people of Isaf could no longer visit the doctor in Uchaf. Something had to be done.

It was Megan, the baker from Uchaf, who came up with the idea. They would build a temporary footbridge themselves, with wood from the local farms. She called Dafydd, the head of the school in Isaf, a man she had not spoken to in twenty years. The phone call was short and very polite. But the next Saturday, sixty people turned up on each side of the river with tools, ropes and sandwiches.

Building a bridge from two sides is not easy. It means you have to agree on things: where the posts go, how wide it should be, who carries what. There were arguments, of course. But by the third weekend, people were sharing tools, then tea, then jokes. Megan and Dafydd discovered that they had both sung in the same choir as children, before their families made them leave. After twenty years of silence, the two of them finally made up.

The footbridge opened in April. It was narrow and a little wobbly, but it worked. The two villages held a single festival that summer, for the first time in history. They still argue about rugby, and nobody has forgiven anybody for the pig. But these days, when people meet on the bridge, they say good morning.