Bridge, Glen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Bridges & Crossings
A nineteenth-century road bridge over the Glen River in County Cork rewards a closer look than most travellers tend to give it.
At 7.5 metres wide and oriented roughly northwest to southeast, it is a modest structure by any measure, yet the care taken in its construction is evident the moment you examine how the materials have been combined. The main body is random-rubble sandstone, the kind of rough, uncoursed stonework that was the workhorse of rural Irish building, but the details are picked out in ashlar limestone, cut and dressed to a much finer standard.
The bridge carries three elliptical arches, with the central arch fractionally wider than its two companions, a subtle asymmetry that was common practice in smaller bridge engineering of the period, balancing the hydraulic demands of a river in spate with the economics of construction. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch together and transfer its load outward to the supporting piers, are well-dressed limestone with chamfered edges and a prominent keystone at each crown. A string course, a narrow horizontal band of projecting stonework, runs above the arches along the face of the bridge, giving the whole composition a degree of visual discipline that lifts it above purely functional work. The parapet above has since acquired a cement coping, a practical later addition that sits a little uneasily against the quality of the original masonry beneath it.