Pont Rhyd Goch and authenticity

For once I had been able to get off the road and take a picture with a good view of a bridge. This is Pont Rhyd Goch, very close to the summit of the entire road. Isn't this a lovely bridge and a classic example of a Thomas Telford bridge? Well, yes and no.

The design you see is Telford, but look carefully under the arch and you can see where the carriageway has been widened with a modern reinforced concrete arch. After that, the outer wall was replaced just as it was, a bit further out, by skilled conservators. So we are seeing what it was supposed to look like, but put back later.  As the purpose of the walk was to seek out the visible signs of the road's history, this, and other artefacts along the way,  poses the question of authenticity. Am I really seeing the history I had set out to see, or is it a pastiche?

The historical legacy of the road is very much respected by the fact that the conservators have needed to do their work. I've seen features along the way, such as depots, which are still there, not because they perform a useful function (although some do, incidentally) but because the highway authorities have chosen to keep them as a reminder of the forebears' work. Nowadays, legislation protects many historic buildings and structures, but they're only still there because landowners and public authorities chose to protect them before there was legislation. At the end of the day, I see and enjoy things that have been deliberately preserved and conserved over the years, when the originals that have not been so well looked-after are tumbled down or overgrown. I conclude (concede?) that the nice looking bits of history are not quite authentically as built.    

At Pont Rhyd Goch, I can't even be sure about the name. New bridges don't seem to have been officially named, but just acquired the names that local people gave them, usually describing what they were near - the river or a nearby building - or, occasionally, what they replaced.  So a name Pont Rhyd Goch (Red Ford Bridge) is typical, suggesting that the bridge was close to, or replaced, a ford where maybe rocks were reddish. The difficulty is that Telford's route for the road here was brand new, the older road, still very clear today as a track and public path, being just across the valley. Having regard to few buildings and tracks in this remote terrain, there just isn't anywhere that would need a ford from the old road across the river at this point: it just wouldn't go anywhere. On a map from 1889, the earliest I have found where the bridge is named, it's called Pont Ty Coch, which may be more original, named after a roadside building, and later adapted to the present name.