Bridge, Cummeenavrick, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Cummeenavrick, Co. Kerry

At Cummeenavrick in County Kerry, a small road bridge crosses a tributary of the Clydagh River, and its two faces tell quietly different stories.

The downstream side has been almost entirely reclaimed by vegetation, its stonework buried under growth, while the upstream face was widened at some point in the relatively recent past, adding a modern strip of road width to the northern side. The result is a structure that reads, depending on which direction you approach from, as either ancient and half-forgotten or pragmatically updated for contemporary traffic.

The bridge's original fabric is worth looking at closely. The abutments, the solid masonry blocks that anchor each end of the arch into the riverbank, are built in random ashlar, meaning the stones were shaped and dressed but laid without strict courses or uniform sizing, a common approach in rural Irish bridge construction that gave builders flexibility when working with locally quarried material. The single arch is segmental rather than semicircular, a shallower curve that was structurally efficient and economical with materials. Its voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form the arch itself, are cut and dressed, suggesting care was taken with the engineering even if the abutments were built more freely. The span across the tributary measures 6.2 metres, modest by any standard, and the total width of the bridge, including its newer extension, runs to 7.2 metres.

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Pete F
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