Whoever held the Brig o' Balgownie held the road. For five hundred years there was no other way to move an army quickly up the eastern coast of Aberdeenshire - no other crossing of the Don wide enough for cavalry, deep enough for trade, solid enough for cannon. The bridge is a single pointed gothic arch, approximately twenty-one metres in span, its apex rising twelve metres above the water at low tide. Granite and sandstone, built rough and built to last. Construction began in the late thirteenth century, paused through the Wars of Scottish Independence, and finished around 1320 - which means it was new when Robert the Bruce died. It has been standing ever since, repaired but not replaced, carrying the medieval north road across the river that defined Old Aberdeen.
The story everyone repeats is that Bishop Henry Cheyne began the bridge around 1290 and Robert the Bruce finished it after driving the bishop into exile - directing the bishop's confiscated rents to the project as an act of piety. The story is romantic and partially true. The earliest written history, by Sir Alexander Hay in a 1605 charter, gives all the credit to Bruce: built by command, and at the expense of, the deceased most invincible prince, Robert Bruce. Parson Gordon, writing sixty years later, added Cheyne's involvement, and by the twentieth century the story had grown to include Richard Cementarius, the medieval mason whose name appears in Aberdeen Castle's Exchequer Rolls of 1264. Cementarius is sometimes called the first Provost of Aberdeen, but the records describe him only as a burgess. He left money to the Church of St Nicholas in 1277 and was dead by 1294 - too early, possibly, to have completed the bridge that bears his attributed name. The truth is that nobody can certainly tell, as Parson Gordon admitted in the 1660s, who builded the Bridge of Done.
Balgownie comes from the barony that surrounded the crossing, and the etymology is more contested than the bridge's authorship. Some authorities derive it from Baile, the Gaelic for town. But the earliest references all start with Pol or Pal - Palgoueny, Polgowny, Polgouny - suggesting Pol, a pool, probably the dark stretch of river known locally as the black neuk. The second element is also debated. Gabhainn might mean of a cattle-fold; gobhainn might mean of a smith. Cattle-pool or smith-pool, take your pick. The first written instance of Polgowny appears in 1256, when the ecclesiastical statutes of St Machar's Cathedral granted the rights of the salmon fishing at Palgoueny to the cathedral's deacon. The Don has always been a salmon river, and the dark pool below the bridge has always been one of the best places to catch them.
By 1605 the bridge was falling down. Five centuries of weather, war traffic, and patchwork repairs had brought it to a state of major deterioration, and the burgh had no regular fund for maintenance. Sir Alexander Hay of Whytburgh stepped in and established a maintenance endowment - the first sustainable financing the bridge had ever had. Other contributions came in from civic and ecclesiastical sources, and between 1607 and 1611 the bridge was completely renovated. Hay's fund was first drawn on in 1616, to buy new cobblestones for the deck. It has been maintained ever since by Aberdeen Council, four hundred years of continuous endowment, an example of how civic institutions can outlast individuals by orders of magnitude when their founders set them up properly.
The Brig o' Balgownie stopped being a main road in 1830 when the new Bridge of Don was built five hundred yards downstream, designed to handle the increasing volume of carriage and cart traffic the old single arch could no longer take. The old bridge was, in effect, decommissioned by modernity - and saved by it. With through traffic diverted, the medieval structure could be left mostly alone. Today it is pedestrianised, category A listed, contender (alongside the Brig o' Doon at Alloway and a handful of others) for the title of Scotland's oldest surviving bridge still in use. Walk across it now and you are walking on stones that may have heard the news of Bannockburn, that certainly carried Covenanter armies in the 1640s, that have spanned the same dark pool over the Don for seven hundred years. Old Aberdeen begins on the far bank, and King's College Chapel's crown is visible up the rise. The Don runs out to the sea two miles east. The bridge holds, as it has always held.
The Brig o' Balgownie sits at 57.18N, 2.10W, where the River Don meets the northern edge of Old Aberdeen. From altitude, look for the small medieval arch about 500 yards upstream from the larger 1830 Bridge of Don on the A956. Aberdeen International (EGPD) lies 3nm northwest. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL in clear conditions; the bridge itself is small but distinctive - a single high pointed arch in a wooded glen, with St Machar's Cathedral and the crown spire of King's College Chapel visible to the south, and Seaton Park's open ground spreading along the south bank of the river.