Copyright All Rights Reserved - Black Diamond Images The 77 metre long one lane Hampden Bridge was designed in popular late nineteenth-century Gothic Revival architectural style, by Ernest Macartney de Burgh, the Australian colony's Assistant Engineer for bridges. The bridge was built to replace the decaying timber truss bridge which originally spanned the Kangaroo River on the Camberwarra Rd (Now Moss vale Rd) in Kangaroo Valley, just west of Gerringong, NSW. Construction began in 1895 and the bridge was opened by the Minister for Public Works, J.H. Young on the 19th May 1898, interestingly, just six days before floods washed the old bridge away. The bridge was named after Lord Hampden, the Governor of New South Wales from 1895 to 1899 and is the only suspension bridge from the colonial period surviving in New South Wales in 2012. The bridge underwent a complete renovation during 2011. There is another historic Hampden Bridge of the same name. It is a wooden Allan Truss bridge built 3 years earlier in the Wagga Wagga district of south western NSW.