Bridge, Coomacullen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Bridges & Crossings
A road that no longer goes anywhere still crosses the Clydagh River at Coomacullen, carried over a narrow gorge by a bridge that the surrounding vegetation has been quietly reclaiming for some time.
The structure is about 7.6 metres wide, oriented roughly northwest to southeast, and built with the kind of considered stonework that suggests it was once rather more than a purely functional crossing.
The bridge is constructed from random rubble, the everyday building material of rural Kerry, but its lower sections and the sides of the abutments are faced in rusticated ashlar, cut stone worked with a deliberately rough surface texture to give it both visual weight and a degree of prestige. The single arch is semicircular, formed with cut-stone voussoirs, the wedge-shaped blocks that distribute the load around the curve of an arch, though overgrowth obscures some of them now. Corbels, small stone projections built into the masonry, jut out at the springing points where the arch begins its curve upward from the supports. Most telling of the bridge's original character is the contrast between its two parapets: the southwest side retains ornamental stone coping, carefully shaped and laid, while the northeast parapet has been rebuilt at some point in concrete, a practical repair that does little for the aesthetics but at least records that someone, at some stage, still cared whether the structure stood.