Bridge, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Co. Dublin |

Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Most bridges announce themselves, but this one has all but disappeared into the historical record, surviving only as a mark on a specialist map.

A single piece of evidence places it with any confidence: the Friends of Medieval Dublin Map, produced in 1978, which plots the locations of known and probable medieval urban features across the city, marks a bridge at this location in Dublin's south city.

The Friends of Medieval Dublin, a scholarly group formed to document and advocate for the city's surviving medieval fabric, produced their map during a period of considerable urgency. The 1970s were a fraught decade for Dublin's archaeology, when large-scale development threatened to erase significant portions of the medieval streetscape before it had been properly studied or recorded. The map itself was an attempt to gather what was then known and to make the case that these locations deserved attention before the ground was broken. A bridge indicated on such a document would typically have served as a crossing over one of the smaller watercourses that once ran through Dublin's south city, many of which were subsequently culverted or diverted entirely. The Poddle and its various tributaries, for instance, shaped the medieval urban landscape south of the Liffey in ways that are now almost invisible at street level.

Because the physical crossing, if any remains of it survive, would be buried beneath later development, there is little to see above ground today. Visitors with an interest in Dublin's medieval layers are better served by pairing a visit to this general area with a look at the Friends of Medieval Dublin Map itself, which has been reproduced and discussed in various publications on the city's archaeology. The map functions as something of a guide to absences as much as presences, pointing to what once existed rather than what remains. Anyone walking the south city with a copy to hand will find that the gap between what the map records and what is now visible tells its own story about how thoroughly a living medieval city can be overwritten in the space of a few centuries.

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