Bridge, Fuhur, Co. Cork

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Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Fuhur, Co. Cork

A disused bridge in Fuhur, on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, spans a stream that runs southward from Pulleen Lake down to Pulleen Harbour.

It is not a grand structure by any measure, just a single segmental arch, roughly three metres wide and a little over one and a half metres high, built with coarse voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch together. What gives it a quiet significance is not the stonework itself but what the road it carried was once used for.

Local tradition holds that in the 1830s, this road served as a route for the transport of ore from the copper mines at Allihies, a few kilometres to the north-west. The Allihies mines were among the most productive copper workings in nineteenth-century Ireland, drawing miners from Cornwall and generating considerable commercial traffic across the peninsula. Getting ore from the inland workings down to the coast required practical infrastructure, and a modest bridge like this one, just over five metres wide, would have been a functional necessity rather than an architectural statement. The coarse construction reflects that pragmatism. It was built to carry weight, not to impress.

The bridge now sits unused, bypassed by time and changing roads, but it survives as a physical trace of an industrial moment that transformed this part of Cork. The stream beneath it still moves south toward the harbour, much as it did when ore-laden carts crossed above it.

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