Bridge, Duncormick, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Bridges & Crossings
The three-arched bridge at Duncormick in County Wexford carries a quiet kind of historical weight that its cement-plastered surface does little to advertise.
Beneath that later coating lie dressed voussoirs, the carefully shaped wedge stones that form and reinforce an arch, pointing to craftsmanship from what is likely the eighteenth century. It is the sort of structure that gets crossed without a second thought, yet it sits at a crossing point with a documented past stretching back well before its present form.
An index to the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1655, compiled in the mid-seventeenth century as part of a broader effort to record landholding across Ireland, notes that a bridge existed at Duncormick as early as 1640. That original structure may have been simpler or built to a different design entirely; what stands today is considered to date from the 1700s, though it clearly occupies a long-established crossing point. The plastering of the arches in cement, a common intervention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries intended to stabilise or waterproof older masonry, has obscured the stonework in a way that makes the bridge's age easy to underestimate at a glance.