Bridge, Coollick, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Coollick, Co. Kerry

A two-arched sandstone bridge over the Gweestin River in Coollick, County Kerry, is one of those structures that rewards a second look.

Built from random rubble sandstone, it carries a road on a north-south axis, spanning the river across two semicircular arches, each with a span of around 4.4 metres. The arches are formed with roughly shaped voussoirs, the wedge-cut stones that lock an arch together under compression, and the whole thing sits at just over five metres wide. What makes it worth pausing at are the details that speak to how it was built and what it has endured: corbels, small stone brackets projecting from both faces of the bridge and from the sides of the abutments, suggest the structure may once have carried timber walkways or railings alongside the road surface. The parapets are topped with concrete coping, a later addition, and iron braces have been threaded through the body of the bridge at some point, presumably to hold together stonework that was beginning to shift.

The bridge's most technically interesting feature is the cutwater on the upstream side of the central pier, a low, pointed projection designed to split the current and reduce the force of water pressing against the masonry during spates. The Gweestin River drains a stretch of upland Kerry, and a bridge here would have been a practical necessity for anyone moving livestock or goods across the valley. The downstream side of the pier has a low projecting plinth rather than a cutwater, an asymmetry that reflects the different hydraulic pressures acting on each face. No construction date is recorded, but the combination of rubble sandstone construction, semicircular arches, and the corbelling arrangement is consistent with vernacular bridge-building traditions that persisted in rural Ireland from the post-medieval period well into the nineteenth century. The iron bracing and concrete coping point to at least one phase of repair or reinforcement carried out after the original build.

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