Crawshaw Woods (Shippen House Farm) bridge, HUL4/20

Crawshaw Woods (Shippen House Farm) bridge is a cast-iron railway overbridge built around 1830-34 by James Walker of Walker & Burges for the Leeds & Selby Railway, with Stanningley Ironworks as the contractor.

The bridge features a single span that carries the track over the railway, designed to accommodate four tracks. It is one of the two surviving cast-iron bridges from that period on the Leeds & Selby Railway. The arch, which supports the original cast-iron deck, has a segmental span of 50 feet (15.2 meters) and is constructed from three cast-iron arched girders with pierced spandrels and vertical struts. The structure is braced with X-section ties at the outer edges and I-section ties towards the center of the span.

The stone abutments are made from Bramley Fall gritstone, featuring tooled quoins and square-cut impost bands from which the cast-iron arch springs. The inner abutment walls and gently curving wing walls are built from squared and coursed, quarry-faced local sandstone. The wing walls are topped with moulded string courses. The parapets consist of wrought-iron balustrades with closely spaced plain railings and a plain iron handrail, resting on the original deck. The string courses of the wing walls end in curved mushroom-top stone piers.

It is noted that the modern timber deck raised above the original deck and the modern sheet steel parapets inside the original iron railings are not considered to have special architectural or historic interest.