Manhole Monday: Kaibara

Not only does Kaibara have a pretty darn good venison restaurant going for it, this little town in the mountains of Hyogo Prefecture (think north of Kobe) has a pretty nice manhole cover:

This is the kinone bashi, a towering 1000-year-old zelkova tree whose roots actually form a bridge across the Okumura river that runs through the center of town. The tree is 22 meters tall (that’s about 72 feet, my fellow Americans 🙂 ) and they’ve actually had to attach metal plating and support beams to the trunk to keep it from falling down. There is, of course, a regular bridge built to hold the pedestrian and vehicular traffic, but they constructed it right next to the root itself and it almost appears as if they are part of the same structure. Definitely one of the more interesting sewer covers I’ve seen in awhile!