Overtoun Bridge: The Scottish Span Where Dogs Leap to Their Deaths
Near the town of Dumbarton in western Scotland, tucked into a quiet estate of woods and old stone, there stands a handsome Victorian bridge. It is a granite arch, tall and graceful, carrying a lane across a deep gorge where a burn runs over the rocks far below. It looks entirely ordinary, even lovely — the sort of bridge a walker might cross on a fine day without a second thought. And yet Overtoun Bridge has earned a dark and genuinely baffling reputation, for over the course of decades an extraordinary number of dogs have, without warning, leapt from it to their deaths on the stones beneath. They spring from the same side, at nearly the same spot, often on clear and pleasant days, and some that survive the fall climb back up and try to jump again. No one has ever fully explained why. The bridge where dogs go to die is one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in Britain. The Leaping Place The pattern has held for a very long time, going back at least to the middle of the twentieth ce...