Bridge, Clogherane, Co. Kerry

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Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Clogherane, Co. Kerry

The bridge at Clogherane carries a road across the Ahadav River on a north-south axis, and at first glance it reads as a fairly ordinary piece of rural Kerry infrastructure.

Look more closely, though, and the structure reveals a small catalogue of engineering decisions and later interventions that make it worth a moment's attention. The parapets are finished with decorative vertical stone coping, an unusual touch for a utilitarian crossing, and reinforcing bars extend across the arches, suggesting someone at some point took the structure's long-term integrity seriously enough to intervene.

Built in the mid to late nineteenth century from random rubble masonry, the bridge spans the Ahadav on two segmental arches, each with a span of around four metres. Segmental arches are shallower than a full semicircle, which keeps the road surface relatively level but puts more outward thrust on the abutments. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch together, along with the underside of the arches and the central pier, have at some point been encased in concrete, a common twentieth-century intervention on older bridges where the original stonework had begun to deteriorate or where increased traffic loads demanded reinforcement. On the upstream, eastern side, a low rounded cutwater projects from the pier to deflect river flow and reduce pressure on the structure during high water. The northern abutment is splayed outward, broadening the bridge's footprint at that end and helping to distribute load into the riverbank.

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