Bridge, Ahane, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Ahane, Co. Cork

A concrete extension bolted onto the southern side is not the sort of thing that makes a bridge look its best, but it does make a useful contrast: beneath and beside that utilitarian addition sits a carefully crafted limestone structure whose original builder clearly had strong opinions about how a bridge should present itself.

The Ahane bridge carries a road east to west over the Owentaraglin River in north County Cork, and what distinguishes it is the quality of its stonework. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form the curve of each arch, are well dressed and chamfered along their edges, and a limestone string course runs above the arches like a ruled line separating the functional from the decorative. Two wide segmental arches span the river, each with a prominent keystone, and the cutwater, the pointed projection that divides the current around the central pier, has a blunt, squared-off point rather than the sharper angles found on later Victorian engineering.

The bridge bears a close resemblance to Duncannon Bridge, a nearby early nineteenth-century crossing that was designed by Richard Griffith. Griffith is perhaps best known to Irish historians for the valuation of property he oversaw in the 1840s and 1850s, a document so comprehensive that genealogists still rely on it today, but he was also a trained engineer and geologist who worked extensively on road and infrastructure projects in Munster in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The similarity in detailing between the two bridges, particularly the dressed limestone and the general proportions, suggests Ahane may belong to the same period and possibly the same design tradition, though the north parapet wall has been heavily repaired at some point, which complicates any reading of the original fabric on that side.

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