Bridge, Urrohogal, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Bridges & Crossings

Bridge, Urrohogal, Co. Kerry

Most road bridges announce themselves simply by doing their job.

This one, spanning the River Maine in County Kerry, does a little more than that. Known locally as Marshall's Bridge, it carries a plaque on the inner face of its eastern parapet recording the year of construction as 1818, and whoever commissioned it clearly had more than pure utility in mind. Each abutment contains a decorative niche, and set into each spandrel, the roughly triangular masonry panel between an arch and the roadway above, is a recessed circular medallion. These are not structural features; they are flourishes, quiet gestures toward ornament on a bridge that would have served a largely rural stretch of Kerry.

The bridge is eight metres wide, with its long axis running north to south, and carries three elliptical arches across the river. The spans measure 6.6 metres, 9.1 metres, and 6.9 metres from north to south, the widest arch positioned towards the centre. It is built primarily of coursed rubble sandstone and shale, with the finer work rendered in cut limestone. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form the curved face of each arch, are dressed limestone, as are the low pointed cutwaters projecting from both sides of the piers. Cutwaters serve to divide the current and reduce the pressure of water against the structure; here they are finished in limestone ashlar, carefully squared stonework that gives them a tidy, deliberate appearance. At each bank, a dry arch of two metres span sits separate from the main crossings, likely to accommodate flood overflow from the Maine. The parapets have since been topped with concrete coping, the one element that speaks plainly to later maintenance rather than the original build. The local name, Marshall's Bridge, almost certainly refers to a person rather than a profession, though nothing in the surviving record identifies who Marshall was.

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