Old Mills Bridge, Mullauns, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Bridges & Crossings
A bridge that appears on one map and vanishes from the next has a particular kind of quiet mystery to it.
The structure crossing the Poulaneigh River at Mullauns in County Tipperary was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1843 under the name 'Old Mills Br.', a label that suggests a working landscape of water-powered industry in the surrounding area. By the time the second edition was produced in the early 1950s, that name had been dropped entirely, leaving the bridge without a title and, in a sense, without an official story.
The bridge was included in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1998, though its inclusion was based largely on that early cartographic reference rather than on any confirmed antiquarian significance. The structure itself is considered likely to date from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, built with cut-stone arches, a method of construction common to functional rural bridges of that period, where dressed or shaped stone was used to form the curved spans that carry the road over the water. Formally, it is classed as not an antiquity, meaning it falls just outside the threshold that would give it protected status as an ancient monument, a distinction that says more about administrative categories than about the bridge's actual age or character.




