Ballynacarrig Bridge, Ballynacarrig, Co. Offaly

The six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, produced in Ireland from the 1830s onwards, recorded the landscape with a thoroughness that has made them invaluable ever since, and Ballynacarrig Bridge in County Offaly earns its small place on that record as an eighteenth-century crossing, noted and named, persisting in cartographic form even where the physical structure may have changed or been forgotten.

Beyond its appearance on the six-inch sheet, the details of the bridge are spare. It dates to the 1700s, a period when the improvement of roads and river crossings across Ireland was gradually being taken in hand, often by local landowners or grand jury presentments, the county-level bodies that funded public works before modern local government existed. Offaly, lying in the Irish midlands and crossed by the River Brosna and numerous smaller watercourses, had plenty of need for such crossings. A bridge built in that century and modest enough that it left little documentary trace beyond its map marking is not unusual for rural Ireland, but that near-anonymity is part of what makes it worth noting.