Bridge, Curragh, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Curragh, Co. Cork

A Latin inscription embedded in the southern parapet wall of a road bridge in Kanturk might easily go unnoticed by anyone crossing it, but it records a specific date, 1745, for the construction of what locals have long called Greenane Bridge.

The bridge carries a road over the River Allow, just north of where the Allow meets the River Dalua, and sits only fifty metres east of a second old crossing. Two bridges this close together, both of considerable age, is itself a minor curiosity in the North Cork landscape.

The structure is built in random-rubble limestone, with six segmental arches, each dressed with voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch together, and a slightly prominent keystone at the crown. Low, D-shaped cutwaters project from the piers to deflect the river current, and the piers themselves are unusually thin, their bases formed from large limestone blocks that appear to have been salvaged from an earlier structure. The arch on the eastern side is slightly skewed, a practical adjustment to accommodate the angle of the road as it approaches from the south. A second plaque, noted by the antiquarian Grove White sometime between 1905 and 1925 as badly defaced but still bearing the words "Grand Jury", referring to the county administrative bodies that funded road infrastructure in this period, has since disappeared entirely. The parapet was later widened on the upstream, northern side by almost six metres, using wide curved voussoirs that echo the style of an extension made to the nearby Kanturk Bridge. More intriguingly still, the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious Cromwellian land-mapping project, already shows a single bridge over both rivers at or very near this spot, suggesting a crossing here predates the 1745 construction by at least a century.

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