Description: This picturesque scene shows the packhorse bridge and ford at Goyt Bridge and is looking south. The bridge actually spanned the Wildmerstone Brook rather than the River Goyt - the latter can be detected in the right foreground, the two streams converging at this point.
Goyt Bridge was flooded in the 1960s by the construction of Errwood Reservoir but by then the appearance of the locality had changed with the buildings to the right having been demolished. Writing in 1954 Chrichton Porteous observed that:
'GoytÆs Bridge without its cottages seems a sad place now for all its remaining beauty. The stepping stones even appear to be gradually disappearing; the pack-horse bridge close by spanning the tributary off Burbage Edge is in much better condition. After coming down the old track off Long Hill, the pack-horses turned sharp right on the lower side of the bridge and went through a ford across the much wider Goyt.'
The bridge was in fact dismantled and re-erected higher up the valley, this time spanning the Goyt proper.
Taken from a commercial postcard published in The British Mirror Series (reference number 141/12 1186).