Survey Data
Reg No
41401837
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Technical
Original Use
Bridge
Date
1845 - 1855
Coordinates
261407, 322889
Date Recorded
27/05/2012
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Single-arch masonry railway bridge, built c.1850, carrying Dundalk to Enniskillen Branch of former Ulster Railway over local access road. Segmental arch with rock-faced rusticated stone voussoirs and random rubble soffit. Squared stone parapet walls, with squared rusticated stone copings. Rock-faced rusticated spandrels and squared random rubble abutment walls. Wing walls, also of squared rubble, project at right angles from north and south elevations, with dressed stone copings and terminating in square-plan piers, some damaged.
Appraisal
The Dundalk-Enniskillen Branch of the Ulster Railway (later subsumed into the Great Northern Railway) opened from Ballybay to Newbliss on 14th August 1855, and was an important transport link between Louth, Monaghan and Fermanagh until its closure in 1959. This well-composed bridge is representative of the skill in engineering and stone-working in the nineteenth century, with rusticated stone voussoirs enhancing the wide elegant arch. The former railway bridge carried the railway on an embankment over an accommodation track in the middle of a large field. It is an aesthetically-pleasing structure, serving as a physical reminder of the extent and social and industrial importance of the railway network in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.