Blackman's
The bridge most Bajans call the Molasses Bridge has been crossing Blackman's Gully in St. Joseph since before 1682, its limestone boulders held together with a mortar that includes molasses and egg whites — a detail that tells you something about how people here have always worked with what the island provides. It stretches between 35 and 40 metres over the gully, wide enough to walk slowly and look down into the green dark below.
Blackman's sits on Barbados's east coast, in the parish of St. Joseph, where the landscape rolls and creases in ways that have earned parts of it the nickname the Scotland District. The gully beneath the bridge is part of an island-wide network, home to green monkeys and plants with medicinal uses, and it took a concerted clean-up effort by the Future Centre Trust to restore it to what it is now.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who find their way here tend to mention the same thing: the bridge is harder to locate than it should be, and that difficulty is part of it. Come on foot or with Island Safari rather than trying to navigate solo. Once you're standing on the limestone, the gully stretches out below you in both directions and the rest of Barbados feels very far away.
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How Blackman's came to be
A map drawn by John Luffman in 1777–78 labels this place Mt. Lucie Plantation, owned by the Heirs of Blackman's — a name that traces back to John Blackman, born 1676, whose family held estates in both Barbados and Antigua. By 1784, the estate had passed through inheritance to William Henry Rowland Irby, whose mother Mary was the daughter of Rowland Blackman. In 1792, the 88½-acre estate was leased for six years at £104 a year.
The plantation's history is inseparable from the violence that sustained it. When the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, Irby received £2,043 7s 10d in compensation for 130 enslaved people held at Mount Lucy, as it was also known. Around the estate's borders, tenantries of chattel houses — wooden homes built to be moved, standing on rented ground — mark the landscape that followed.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Blackman's in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
February through April brings the least rain and temperatures that stay between roughly 21°C and 31°C, which makes it the most comfortable window for walking the gully. The wet season runs June through November, with September to November seeing the heaviest rainfall and the possibility of tropical storms — not impossible to visit, but the trails will be muddier and the weather less predictable.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.