Bridge, Dunisky, Co. Cork

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Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Dunisky, Co. Cork

Beneath the surface of the Lee Valley reservoir in County Cork, a nineteenth-century road bridge sits in permanent submersion, its arch still intact and its stonework largely undisturbed.

The road it once carried is long gone, the river it crossed has been absorbed into a much larger body of water, and yet the structure endures, occasionally visible when water levels drop far enough to expose the top of the arch above the waterline.

The bridge appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, recorded as a crossing over the Buingea River. It is a sandstone structure roughly 8.25 metres wide, built around a single semicircular arch, with voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form the curve of the arch, cut from rusticated limestone, and a limestone string course running along the exterior. The road surface has been worn away entirely, leaving the crown of the arch bare. Its overall character suggests a mid-nineteenth-century construction, and it was most likely rebuilt around the time the Cork-Macroom Direct Railway was being laid through the area between 1861 and 1866; the railway line passed approximately 100 metres to the south-west. The Lee Valley Hydro-electric Scheme, developed in the mid-twentieth century, created the reservoir that eventually swallowed the bridge along with much of the surrounding landscape, a fate shared by a number of structures and at least one village in the valley.

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Pete F
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