Ballymoe Bridge, Dundermot, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Bridges & Crossings
The current bridge at Ballymoe carries traffic across the River Suck on the county boundary between Roscommon and Galway, and there is nothing about it that would cause a passing driver to slow down.
It was built in 1978, looks it, and replaced something far older without leaving a single visible remnant of what came before.
What makes the crossing worth pausing over is how long a bridge has stood here, or at least how long one has been recorded. A map of the Ballymoe half-barony produced in 1683 under the direction of Sir William Petty, the surveyor responsible for the enormously ambitious Down Survey of Ireland in the 1650s, already marks a bridge at this point on the Suck. The same crossing appears on every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map that followed across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That continuity of more than three centuries is not unusual in itself for an Irish river crossing, but it becomes quietly interesting when set against the complete absence of physical evidence. The 1978 structure sits on the footprint of its predecessor, yet nothing of the older bridge survives above or apparently below ground. The archaeology is a blank where the cartography is detailed.