Bridge, Nohaval, Co. Cork

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Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Nohaval, Co. Cork

One of the three arches on this old road bridge sits slightly lower than its two companions, a small asymmetry that is easy to miss at a glance but becomes quietly puzzling the longer you look.

The bridge carries a road across the River Blackwater at the boundary between Cork and Kerry, meaning that to cross it is, in a modest but literal sense, to pass from one county into another.

The structure dates in appearance to the late eighteenth or nineteenth century, built on a northeast to southwest axis with three semicircular arches, each spanning roughly 6.7 metres. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch together, are rough rather than finely dressed, which gives the whole thing a workmanlike rather than decorative quality. Pointed cutwaters, the angled projections that divide the current and protect the piers from the force of water, stand on either side; the upstream cutwater to the northeast has since been replaced in concrete, a practical repair that sits somewhat awkwardly against the original stonework. Drain holes run along the base of the parapet wall, and the coping, the capping course along the top, is also concrete. The bridge is 6.5 metres wide, broad enough for a road of its era, and the slight drop in the eastern arch hints at the kind of incremental settlement or repair that accumulates over a century or two of use.

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