Bridge, Cloonkeen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Cloonkeen, Co. Kerry

There is something quietly contradictory about a bridge that actively resists being looked at.

The structure at Cloonkeen carries a road across the narrow gorge of the Clydagh River in County Kerry, but its upstream face is inaccessible and difficult to see, meaning that half of the bridge essentially hides itself from inspection. What survives of the visible, downstream face has been largely rendered over in concrete, leaving only the parapets in their earlier state, built from random rubble stonework with a concrete coping running along the top.

The bridge itself is modest in scale, measuring 5.6 metres in width and oriented east to west along its long axis. Its most architecturally interesting feature is the single segmental arch, a shallow, curved form rather than a fully rounded one, which spans the gorge beneath. At the springing points, where the arch begins to curve upward from the abutments on either side, there are projecting corbels, small blocks of stone that jut outward from the masonry. Corbels of this kind at the springing points of an arch are a detail that can help date a structure or identify the hand of a particular builder, though here the concrete render over much of the surface makes a fuller reading of the construction difficult.

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Pete F
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