Bridge, Releagh, Co. Kerry

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Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Releagh, Co. Kerry

A small road bridge over the Baurearagh River in Releagh, County Kerry, turns out to be a quietly accomplished piece of masonry once you look closely.

It carries the road across on three semicircular arches, each spanning roughly 3.65 metres, and the whole structure measures just over 7.4 metres wide. What makes it unusual is not its scale but the way it meets the river: the piers do not sit on foundations built down into the riverbed but instead rise directly from protruding sections of natural bedrock, with the water guided through channels cut into the living rock on either side. The northern arch, as a result, is currently dry, the river having settled into its southern channels and left that span standing over bare stone.

The construction is careful and deliberate throughout. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch into compression and give it its load-bearing strength, are large and well cut, and both the piers and the abutments are built in ashlar, meaning dressed and squared stonework rather than rough rubble. Two horizontal string courses, shallow projecting bands of stone, run across the bridge's face: one just above the crowns of the arches, and a second at the level where the arches begin to spring from the piers. These are not merely decorative; they give the structure a composed, considered quality that suggests a builder working to a recognised tradition rather than improvising. Vertical stone coping caps the parapets along the top. The orientation runs roughly north to south, carrying the road across the grain of the river.

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Pete F
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