Bridge, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Somewhere beneath or near the modern streetscape of Oliver Bond Street in Dublin's south city, a medieval bridge has yet to be found.

Its existence is not in serious doubt, but its precise location remains unidentified, which places it in an unusual category: a monument recorded, catalogued, and given a reference number, yet physically elusive. The bridge once crossed a tail race, the channel of water released downstream from a mill after it had done its work turning the wheel, and that tail race served a cluster of medieval watermills whose outlines were still clear enough in 1610 for the cartographer John Speed to mark them on his map of Dublin City.

Speed's map shows the bridge sitting to the west of Gormund's Gate, one of the medieval city's lesser-known entry points, and to the north of what the records call Mullinahack Mill. The watercourse it crossed also appears in a document from 1347 to 1348, which refers to a lane called Lotebourne running from the King's High Way outside Gormund's Gate. That lane was later renamed Mullinahack Lane, and it is possible the bridge formed part of this same route, carrying foot and cart traffic over the mill's tail race as people moved in and out of the medieval city. The underlying watercourse has not entirely vanished from the archaeological record: sections of it were excavated on the south side of Oliver Bond Street by archaeologist Linzi Simpson, and Clare Walsh investigated the tail race on the north side of the street in 1997, producing an unpublished assessment submitted to the National Monuments Service.

There is nothing to see at the site in any conventional sense, which is part of what makes it worth knowing about. Oliver Bond Street is an ordinary urban road in the Liberties area of Dublin, and the watercourse that once ran beneath it is long buried. Anyone curious about the broader context might consult Speed's 1610 map, which is reproduced in various historical surveys of Dublin and shows the mill complex marked with an X. The interest here is less in visiting a place than in knowing that the ground underfoot in this part of the city holds an unresolved medieval question, one that archaeological excavation has approached but not yet answered.

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