Bridge, Friarstown South, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Bridges & Crossings
A modest two-arch road bridge over the River Camoge in County Limerick carries more history than its quiet rural setting might suggest.
Known as Sixmile Bridge, the current structure dates to around 1800, but its significance lies partly in what may have stood here long before that. The Down Survey Barony map of Smallcounty, produced in the mid-seventeenth century under the direction of Sir William Petty as part of a vast Cromwellian-era land mapping project, appears to show a bridge at this very crossing, raising the possibility that the present span replaced a medieval structure on the same site.
The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage records the bridge in some detail. It is built of rubble limestone with rendered copings along the parapets, and its two arches are round-headed, formed with cut limestone voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch together and distribute its load. The bridge also features U-cutwaters, the projecting triangular or curved piers on the upstream face of the bridge that deflect the flow of water and reduce pressure on the structure. Together, these elements are characteristic of competent early nineteenth-century road engineering in rural Ireland, practical and durable rather than decorative. The NIAH has assigned it registration number 21902305.
The bridge sits in the townland of Friarstown South, and the Camoge River, which it crosses, flows through a quietly agricultural stretch of east Limerick before joining the Maigue. There is no elaborate visitor infrastructure here, which is rather the point. The bridge is best appreciated as a working structure still doing what it was built to do, carrying a road over a river, as something very like it may have done since the medieval period. Those interested in the Down Survey connection might look into the digitised Barony maps held by repositories such as the Royal Irish Academy, where the original cartographic evidence for the earlier crossing can be examined.