Green's Bridge

Five-arch bridge over river, designed 1763; built 1764-6. Repaired, 1835. Remodelled, 1969, producing present composition. Part ivy-covered walls centred on tooled limestone ashlar triangular cutwaters to piers having pedimented aedicule-topped stepped capping with cut-limestone beaded stringcourse on ogee consoles supporting parapet having cut-limestone coping. Series of five elliptical arches with cut-limestone blocked archivolts. Sited spanning River Nore with unkempt banks to river.

A bridge erected by William Colles (1702-70) to designs (1763) by George Smith (----) representing an important component of the mid eighteenth-century civil engineering heritage of County Kilkenny with the architectural value of the composition, a near-perfect copy of the first-century Ponte di Tiberio in Italy as illustrated by Andrea Palladio (1508-80) in "I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura" (1570), confirmed not only by the blue-grey limestone dressings demonstrating good quality workmanship, but also by the elegant "sweep" of the arches making a pleasing visual statement at a crossing over the River Nore. NOTE: The construction of Green's Bridge was precipitated by 'violent floods...which on the 2d of October 1763 swept away the two bridges in Kilkenny, Bennet's bridge and Thomastown bridge, and broke two arches of the bridge in Inistioge' (Encyclopædia Metropolitana XXI 1845, 229); the cost 'For rebuilding John's, and Green's bridges, in the city of Kilkenny, and Bennet's, Thomastown, and Castlecomer bridges in the county of Kilkenny, and for repairing the bridge of Enisteague [sic], in the said county of Kilkenny' was set at £8,000 (The Annual Register 1764, 161).