A DAREDEVIL who is helping to construct the UK’s highest bridge has shared some of the stunning pictures he captured over the past two years.
John Muirhead, 29, from Rosyth, Fife, has released shots the unique vantage point of his high-wire construction work on the new Queensferry Crossing – 650ft above the Firth of Forth.
They feature banks of impenetrable fog, beautiful sunsets, rainbows – and even a Christmas tree welded from scraps of steel.
The £1.45bn, 207m-high crossing near Edinburgh – the third to span the firth – is due to be completed next year.
John’s impressive amateur photography has recorded the sublime views of the existing road and rail crossings that the team have enjoyed in return for their painstaking work at heady heights.
His photos – taken with only a standard mobile phone camera – show the incredible sights he has seen working on the north tower of the bridge in all of the elements Scotland has thrown at him.
The earliest photos are from December 2013 – his first Christmas working up the tower and piloting the barge that ferries workers and materials to the site.
With the Forth Road Bridge in the background, a makeshift Christmas tree can be seen on the dock of the North side of the Forth.
John said: “We’d not long just started the tower then, and that was the first Christmas on the tower.
“Me an a welder made that up – it’s a Christmas tree made out of the rebar the bridge is made of – we just painted it green and stuck some lights on it.
Just weeks later he snapped another picture of a double rainbow over the estuary, after a torrential downpour and winds up to 99mph.
And a later picture shows the Scottish flag flying on the construction site, in celebration of the upcoming referendum in September 2014.
One more snap shows the incredible sunrise he witnessed from the north tower this summer.
He said: “One morning we went up to work – we’d already started working – it was black in the morning, and then 16 minutes later that sunrise began to come up over the horizon”
And just last month he captured incredible scenes of fog rolling up the river in the early hours – engulfing the Scottish countryside to the north and Edinburgh to the south.
One picture – taken from the bird’s eye view at the top of the north tower – shows the fog creeping under the iconic rail bridge under skies criss-crossed with airplane contrails.
And others show scenes of the thick fog covering for as far as the eye can see – with only the very tip of the Forth Road Bridge struggling to peek through the fog.
On the same morning he snapped a picture looking across to the south tower – which can be seen standing prominently above even the highest layers of the thick sea mist.
He said: “The fog rolled down the Forth and covered the whole place – I ran up the tower after that and got the pictures.”
Working on the bridges that span the Firth of Forth runs in his family, he explained.
“My brother worked on the railway bridge – he was blasting and painting the bridge at the time. And my dad had a brief spell on the road bridge.”
The Queensferry Crossing – soon to be Britains’ tallest functioning bridge – is one of Europe’s biggest infrastructure projects.
The completed bridge will stand 207m above sea level at high tide when it is completed later this year.
When it is finally open to public traffic 150,000 tonnes of concrete will have been poured, and 10m man hours will have been spent on the project.
