Bridge, Ballymore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Bridges & Crossings
A six-arch limestone bridge crossing the Craughwell River in south Galway carries within its fabric the visible record of three separate building campaigns, each one readable in the stonework if you know where to look.
The bridge at Ballymore is no longer in vehicular use, having been bypassed, but the consequence of that demotion is that the structure has survived largely intact, and that survival has preserved something genuinely unusual: the wicker centring to the soffits of the earliest section. Centring is the temporary wooden framework erected beneath an arch to support the stones while the mortar sets and then removed once the arch can bear its own weight. Here, the wicker impression left behind in the underside of the arches has endured for around four centuries, a faint but legible ghost of the original construction method.
The bridge dates to around 1600 and was widened twice in subsequent generations. The first widening, extending the deck to the west, likely took place in the late seventeenth century and added roughly two feet to the original ten-foot width. A second widening, this time to the east, followed around 1780 and matched the full width of the original span. The result is a structure that grew incrementally outward from its core, and the two faces tell different architectural stories. The east elevation presents segmental arches with cut-stone voussoirs, those wedge-shaped blocks that lock an arch together, along with dressed stone V-cutwaters, the pointed projections on the piers designed to divide the river current and reduce pressure on the structure. The west elevation is less uniform, with pointed, round, and segmental arch forms and an arch ring of irregular voussoirs that is partly concealed within the later fabric. The piers themselves appear to have been refaced in squared limestone blocks, probably during the final phase of work in the eighteenth century, giving them a tidier appearance than the rubble stone walls and parapets above.