bridge

Single-arch masonry railway bridge, built c.1850, carrying Dundalk to Enniskillen Branch of former Ulster Railway over road. Segmental arch with rock-faced rusticated stone voussoirs, and random rubble soffit. Squared rubble stone parapet walls, with rusticated stone copings. Rock-faced rusticated spandrels, and squared rubble abutment walls. Squared rubble wing walls project at right angles from north and south elevations, with dress stone copings and terminating in piers.

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 north of Derryvally House, to the south of a former flax and corn mill, and close to Shantonagh Junction to the west. 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.