A well known landmark to locals and holidaymakers is the little house that sits atop an island off the shore of Towan Beach in Newquay, England. Featured in many postcards, “The Island House”, as it is known, has become symbolic of Newquay itself.

The Island has been used as a rather small potato farm, a chicken run, a Sunday School classroom, an art gallery, a guest house, and a tea room. However, today it is the home of the 4th Viscount Long and his wife Lady Helen.

To get to the Island House one must cross a 30-metre long miniature suspension foot bridge.

The footbridge was supposedly modelled after the suspension bridge in Bristol.

The Island was kept from being entered into Guinness as the “World’s Smallest Full-time Inhabited Island” by a European Union directive in 2003 that classified islands as having at least fifty people living on them. So the Island House should actually be called the Outcrop House.

Lady Helen once quipped,

Being referred to as Lady of the Outcrop sounds like I have a bad case of chickenpox.

Here in the Netherlands we find a very unusual kind of bridge.

Like many small bridges, the bright blue and yellow Slauerhoffbrug is required to retract out of the way to let boats pass by. Unfortunately the Google Earth images were captured while the bridge was acting as a road, so other than a strange structure bolted on the side, it isn’t yet clear why we’d want to link to it…

Switch over to Bird’s Eye View on Live Maps however, and we suddenly see what makes this bridge so unusual! The middle section of the road is contained on a massive arm that swings upwards, pulling the middle of the bridge through 90 degrees, way up into the air! (Ground-level picture)

You can also see that due to the position of the swinging arm of the bridge, there’s a large gap in the surface of the road when the bridge is in the open position. This gap is filled by the arm when the bridge is open to traffic, and the arm even has road markings on it.

Built in 2000, the Slauerhoffbrug is a kind of cantilevered drawbridge, but skewed to one side. Apparently it was built like this so that the mechanism could be built beside the road without interrupting the flow of traffic - except for a few days at the end of the construction.

Many thanks to Wojtek Kutyla.

The New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia is the highest road bridge in the Americas and (until Google updates their French imagery), is the tallest road bridge visible on Google Earth.

The bridge is a spectacular steel-arch construction which carries Highway 19 at a height of 267 metres over the New River. Completed in 1977, the New River Gorge Bridge was the highest road bridge in the world for the next 27 years, until it was finally surpassed in height by the Millau Viaduct in 2004.

The old bridge that it replaced is still visible way down at the bottom of the gorge. Locals apparently say that the new bridge cut the travel time from one side of the gorge to the other from 45 minutes, right down to 45 seconds.

The Street View car has paid the bridge a visit too, and the view on approach gives you an idea of just how massive a structure it is, spanning some 924 metres.

Halfway across there’s a rather nice view, but only from one side unfortunately. Although Wikipedia reckons an average of more than 16,000 cars cross the bridge each day, these images were obviously taken in the very early morning, as there’s hardly a soul to be seen.

What neither the satellite shots or the street view images show is how incredibly impressive this bridge looks from either side - so for that, we’ll have to refer you to Flickr instead.

There’s more on the New River Gorge Bridge at Wikipedia.

Thanks to SteveH and Loren.

Drivers on the A10 ring road in Amsterdam can be forgiven for any confusion experienced when they see this incomplete section of highway bridge.

We’re not sure what happened - maybe the construction crew finished up early one Friday afternoon and by the following Monday had forgotten what they were supposed to be building?

Meanwhile in Tehran, a similar situation seems to be coming to an end. We’re told this bridge sat unconnected to anything for at least 8 years, but the construction currently visible at the north end of the bridge may mean that it will finally get put to use some day. Still a bit of a drop if you were to drive off the south end though…

Let us know if you find any more abandoned bridges.

Thanks to Asmir Babaca and Mazi.

The Laredo International Bridge 1 is one of four road bridges that cross the Rio Grande to connect the cities of Laredo, USA and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

The 320 m long bridge is officially known as the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge (Wikipedia) and, as we can see from this satellite shot, the sheer volume of cars waiting to get into the states really help it to live up to its name - nearly a million cars cross this bridge each year, albeit slowly.

There’s a webcam on the American side that shows a typical American street scene, while the webcam on the Mexican side seems to always show a scene very similar to what we can see in the satellite shot.

In the webcams you might also spot one of the 4 million pedestrians who cross the bridge on foot each year.

Laredo International Bridge 2, or officially the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge (Wikipedia), was built in 1976 to alleviate traffic on the first bridge, and is only open to buses and non-commercial traffic.

Slightly shorter at 307 m it has six lanes, four or which head north into the US. All four northbound lanes appear to be continually gridlocked, which is hardly surprising when you hear that over 4 million non-commercial vehicles cross here every year.

Google’s Street View car never got close enough to see the bridge itself, but we can see the front of the border control building from a distance.

Next up is the Laredo International Bridge 3, or Colombia-Solidarity International Bridge (Wikipedia), which has eight lanes this time and of all the bridges so far carries the most commercial traffic - around 270,000 vehicles each year.

Our final road bridge is the Laredo International Bridge 4, or World Trade International Bridge (Wikipedia), which despite also having eight lanes, is only open to commercial vehicles - a LOT of them. In the past year this bridge has been crossed by nearly 1.2 million commercial vehicles.

It’s not only road bridges that connect the two countries here either - there’s also the Laredo International Railway Bridge, or Texas-Mexican Railway International Bridge (Wikipedia) which connects the Texas Mexican Railway in the US with Mexico’s Kansas City Railway.

Ironically, unlike the road bridges, the Google Street View car got close enough to the railway bridge for a photo opportunity.

As if that wasn’t enough bridges, plans are already underway for the construction of yet another road bridge and two more railway bridges.

For the full breakdown of statistical data about these bridges, see this traffic distribution chart at cityoflaredo.com.

Congratulations to Fraser, who finally got a suggestion published.