The covered bridges of Union County, Ohio

October 28, 2025

The Garden House (Devon, England)

The destinations are beginning to blur but looking at the tour guide booklet, I see that we are now in Plymouth. Today, we visited two gardens designed by Keith Wiley. The first is The Garden House , where Wiley worked as Head Gardener for 25 years (from 1978-2003). The 10-acre estate was purchased in the 1940s by former Eton schoolmaster Lionel Fortescue and his wife Katherine. It was formerly home to the vicars of Buckland Monachronum. The Fortescue's renovated the gardens and ran a market garden business and raised cattle. The remains of some of the original buildings in the vicarage still stand in the garden and serve as a romantic backdrop in the Walled Garden - I loved the way they had massed ferns together. Just stunning! Surrounding the walled garden and venturing out away from the house are more naturalistic plantings - Today, the head gardener is Nick Haworth, who was previously head gardener at Greenway , which we visited earlier. Keith Wiley lef...

Here are a few photos of the covered bridges of Union County, Ohio. We had a day to ourselves and decided to tour the countryside after finding a brochure at our motel on these covered bridges in a nearby county.

It took us a while to get our bearings and we quickly learned that a GPS is not very helpful for locating bridges. We stopped at a service station to ask for directions and I could not help but notice that they had a fantastic deli with great looking sandwiches and pizza. We got directions from a very helpful lady, got some sandwiches and headed toward the first bridge, which was just a few miles away. We had a picnic in the back of the car.

The bridges were all built in the late 1800s with the exception of a few. All were marked with plaques that explained the history and cost of the bridge and information about the men who built them.

I wondered why bridges were covered in the first place? I thought maybe it was to keep horses from being frightened about stepping across a platform over open water. Michael thought that maybe they served as protection for travelers in the case of storms or rain. Well, it turns out we were both wrong. According to an Internet search, the answer is obvious and simple - covering the bridges protected them from rotting. An uncovered bridge might last about ten years whereas a covered one can last for centuries.