Longfordpass Bridge, Graiguepadeen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Bridges & Crossings
The modern bridge carrying traffic across the Black River at Graiguepadeen sits on what was once one of the more significant arteries in Ireland, the old Cork to Dublin road.
Unremarkable in itself, it draws a quiet kind of interest from what it may have replaced, or at least from what once stood somewhere nearby and has since entirely vanished.
The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed Cromwellian-era land inventory compiled to facilitate the redistribution of confiscated Irish lands, recorded a structure at or near this location called the Bridge of Durragh. That survey, published in a modern edition by Robert Simington in 1931, is one of the more valuable documentary sources for mid-seventeenth-century Ireland, cataloguing not just land ownership but local features such as mills, castles, and bridges. The Bridge of Durragh is noted there, but nothing of it remains visible on the ground today. Whether it was dismantled, swept away by flooding, or simply absorbed into later construction is not known. The current bridge offers no outward clue that anything older preceded it.