A covered bridge is a timber-truss bridge with a roof and siding which, in most covered bridges, create an almost complete enclosure. The purpose of the covering is to protect the wooden structural members from the weather. Uncovered wooden bridges have a life span of only 10 to 15 years because of the effects of rain and sun.
Bridges having covers for reasons other than protecting wood trusses, such are for protecting pedestrians, are also sometimes called covered bridges.
Read more about Covered Bridge: History and Development, Examples of Covered Bridges, Other Covered Bridges, Covered Bridges in Fiction, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words covered and/or bridge:
“Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)