AFTER years of dragging their heels and finalising contracts, Monmouthshire County Council finally started work on the footbridge in Castle Meadows last week.

Here’s the rub! It’s just not the super bridge spanning the River Usk that they’ve been promising for almost a decade.

It’s a bit smaller than that.

Actually, a lot smaller!

It won’t provide pedestrians and cyclists with safe passage from Abergavenny to Llanfoist or vice versa, but it does mean you’ll get to walk over a lovely ditch.

Way back in September 2023, MCC proudly announced that Welsh Government Active Travel funding had been awarded and the bridge would be built by December, 2024.

Here we are, nearly halfway through 2026, and the bridge has still to be built.

The council’s Labour cabinet member for rural affairs and tourism, Sara Burch, explained in 2025, “Delivering that new route across the fast-flowing river, through an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), a historic landscape was never going to be easy.”

Unless you’re Lionel Ritchie, nothing ever is. However, hope is on the horizon.

Possibly an attempt to gain some bridge-building practice, MCC has decided to tear down a wooden structure at the Abergavenny end of Castle Meadows and replace it with something new.

As you can see from the pictures, it doesn’t quite boast the rustic, rural, and bespoke vibe of its predecessor, but what it lacks in old-world charm, it makes up for in what people who wear black polar necks and body warmers class as industrial chic.

It’s not going to be the sort of bridge any self-respecting troll would ever live under, but it’ll probably end up a great place to store supermarket trolleys and old beer cans.

Either way. Once work on this bridge is finished and MCC gets a taste for engineering miracles, we can undoubtedly expect movement on the super bridge that will be the envy of serious bridge lovers everywhere.