Bridge, Prioryland, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Bridges & Crossings
At Prioryland in County Meath, two fragmentary stone arches survive from a bridge that no longer crosses anything in particular.
The river it once spanned has since shifted course, leaving the structure marooned in the landscape, a crossing without water beneath it.
The bridge appears on the Down Survey maps, the remarkable mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project commissioned under William Petty to document Irish land ownership following the Cromwellian confiscations. Its presence on those maps places the bridge firmly in use by the 1650s at the latest, though it may well be older. At some point after that survey was made, the river moved, as rivers in low-lying Meath are apt to do over time through natural changes in channel and drainage. What remains are fragments of two arches, enough to suggest the bridge's original form but not enough to recover it fully.