Mystery over face on the Iron Bridge

Is this the face of Abraham Darby secretly hidden in the structure of Shropshire's world-famous Iron Bridge?

Ironbridge resident Kerrie Vaughan was astonished when walking under the bridge to look up and see a mysterious face in profile.

"I was amazed, to be honest," said Kerrie. "Even my 80-year-old grandad who lived in the area knew nothing about it. It seems to me to be quite a guarded secret.

"I was doing canvassing for work and walked under the bridge with a businessman who asked me to look up and see if I could see anything.

"I couldn't really see. But when he pointed it out, on both sides of the bridge, I was amazed by it. Not a lot of people seem to know about it," she added.

The suggestion is that Abraham Darby, who built the world's first Iron Bridge in 1779, had his profile built into the structure, just under the apex of the bridge.

"You can see his forehead, his nose, his chin, and his long hair," said Kerrie.

"If you go underneath the bridge and look up at a particular angle, that's the only way you can see it. I have been told that when the sun shines it reflects the face of Abraham Darby on to the river, although I haven't seen that myself."

Trawling the internet, Kerrie has come up with only one reference to the mysterious face, with an image carried on the Flickr website.

She took her own photo on a mobile phone.

Paul Gossage, of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, said: "There is no historical reference to it.

"It's a well known local legend, more than anything else. We can only put it down to folklore.

"It definitely would not have been implemented by the Darby family because they were Quakers and anything capturing their image would be highly frowned upon, which is why there are no portraits of them."

He said the phenomenon had been noticed before and had been mentioned in a TV programme on the making of the Iron Bridge some years ago.