Nine Arch Bridge, Demodara
Interesting facts
- The viaduct is popularly nicknamed the Bridge in the Sky.
- The bridge is roughly 91 metres long, 7.6 metres wide and about 24 metres high.
- It carries a single broad-gauge track, 5 ft 6 in wide, on a curve of about nine degrees.
- It was built entirely by local labour under British supervision, in terrain where moving materials was a major challenge.
- It was formally declared an archaeological protected monument in February 2023.
- Close by at Demodara, the same line spirals round a hill and passes beneath itself, with the station sitting directly above a 320-metre tunnel.
- According to legend, the engineer D. J. Wimalasurendra conceived the Demodara loop after watching a man wind his turban around his head.
Why it is worth it
The Nine Arch Bridge carries the upcountry railway of Sri Lanka across a green ravine near Demodara, between the stations of Ella and Demodara, and it is one of the loveliest pieces of railway engineering in the tropics. Nine tall masonry arches, about 24 m high, march across the gap on a curve, framed by tea bushes and forested hillsides; at one end the line disappears into a tunnel. When a train comes through, the whole scene looks composed for a painting.
The bridge was completed in 1919 on the extension of the line towards Badulla. It was designed by Harold Cuthbert Marwood of the Ceylon Government Railway's construction department, who was in charge of that section, and it had to accommodate both a sharp curve and a steep gradient in difficult terrain. The structure is built of stone, brick and cement, with concrete cornice blocks supporting the arches, and its construction was documented in a 1923 engineering report. Local tradition credits a Ceylonese builder, P. K. Appuhami, and tells that the steel intended for the bridge was diverted to the war effort, so that it had to be built without it; neither story is supported by documents, but both are part of the bridge's place in local memory. It is now a protected archaeological monument.
The charm of the bridge is the way engineering and landscape melt into each other. The arches pick up the rhythm of the terraced tea gardens around them, and the curve of the viaduct follows the contour of the hillside so naturally that it seems to have grown there. The best views are from the tea fields on the slopes opposite the tunnel end, from which you can look down on the full length of the arches, ideally when a train is due.
Getting there
The bridge lies close to the hill town of Ella, from which a walk of roughly 30 minutes to an hour, partly through tea plantations, leads to it; Badulla is about 11 km away. The nearest international airport is Mattala Rajapaksa (HRI), about 66 km away. Ella and Demodara both have railway stations on the scenic line from Kandy to Badulla.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Buduruvagala 21.1 km · rock-cut-architecture
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From the encyclopaedia
The Nine Arch Bridge also called the Bridge in the Sky, is a viaduct bridge in Sri Lanka and one of the best examples of colonial-era railway construction in the country.
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