About 70 kilometres northwest of Aleppo, and just a stone’s throw from the Turkish border, a Roman bridge crosses the Afrin River.

I came across it one day while a mate and I were trying to find the Greek – and later Roman – city of Cyrrhus. We came to the bridge and stopped the car and said ‘Whoa – can we drive over that?’ It looked solid enough and sure enough it was. In fact for nearly 2000 years it had stood up to continued traffic.

I liked to imagine a division of Roman soldiers crossing that bridge on their way to Damascus or Palestine.

The bridge is typical of the surprises you would encounter while driving in northern Syria.

This is one of my favourite photos from Syria and it shows the little travelled back roads snaking through olive groves and through undulating landscapes.

As I was photographing the bridge, a couple of boys leading a flock of sheep and goats crossed the bridge just as shepherds had probably crossed the road for 2,000 years. To them it was just an old bridge.

Anytime you pulled out a big camera and tripod in Syria, you would always attract a crowd and it was no different at the Afrin River. The shepherd boy saw me up the hill taking the photo of the bridge and grabbed a kid from the flock and walked up the hill to check me out and show me the recently born kid.