Bridge, Ballysadare, Co. Sligo

What looks like a solid, workaday span over the Ballysadare River is in fact at least the third attempt to bridge this stretch of water, and the original crossing it replaced has left no trace at all above ground.

The Down Survey, the mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned under Oliver Cromwell to document Irish landholdings for redistribution, recorded a bridge at Ballysadare on its barony maps of 1654 to 1657. That structure is gone entirely. A separate, earlier bridge appears to have stood to the north-west of the present one. What remains today is a bridge of eighteenth-century appearance on the south-western edge of the town, oriented on a north-east to south-west axis and roughly six metres wide. It carries seven segmental arches, the openings increasing in size towards the centre, a design that distributes the load efficiently and was common in Irish bridge-building of that period. The dressed voussoirs, the carefully shaped wedge stones that form each arch, are still visible, as are the low pointed cutwaters, the projecting piers that divide the current and protect the structure from debris, though their tops have been patched with concrete at some point. The bridge core is rendered, the arches have been underpinned for reinforcement, and a cantilevered extension with iron railing has widened the carriageway in more recent times. The Down Survey map also recorded a mill on the east bank of the river, downstream from the crossing, suggesting that this was already a busy, working part of the river long before the present bridge was built.