Campsie Bridge

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

A two-span humpback road-over-river stone bridge carrying the Irishtown Road over the River Drumragh, built c.1750, located south of Omagh town centre.

Squared and tooled basalt spandrels, parapet and V-shaped cutwaters carried up to parapet as pedestrian refuges; remains of blocked round-headed flood arch to right end of north elevation. Round-headed arches sprung from cement-rendered splayed footing, rubble basalt voussoirs. Single carriageway is tarmac with cement-rendered parapets on carriageway elevation with rock-faced and feather-edged parapet coping, with modern cast-iron lamps.

Grassed and wooded embankments, boundary walls with soldier-coursed rubble basalt coping extending from parapets, that to southwest wraps around a three-bay single-storey house with pitched artificial slate roof, rendered chimneystack, roughcast walls over rubble plinth, blocked square-headed windows and a door.

Walling: Basalt

Historical information

The bridge is captioned in the first three editions (1833, 1854 and 1906) of the OS Map as “Campsie Bridge.”

The OS Memoirs also lists it among “the bridges thrown over the Camowen are those of…Bloody Bridge, Campsie & Omagh, all of substantial stone” (p.20).

According to local tradition, the bridge is named after King James II, for whom the townspeople burned most of their own city in advance of his stay en route to Strabane, which he made his headquarters during the siege of Derry. During his flight from Derry, James is supposed to have stayed at what became 20 High Street, later the site of the town hall (HB11/13/016). “When leaving Omagh, he crossed the bridge at Irishtown, which is now known as King James’ Bridge” (Knox, p. 48).

McCutcheon writes that “the bridge at Campsie, Omagh, spanning the Drumragh [R]iver…may well in its local name of ‘King James’ Bridge’ perpetuate a late-[seventeenth-]century crossing point of the river but is itself likely to be a structure dating from around the mid-[eighteenth] century” (McCutcheon, 11.4).

A great deal of work has been done to this bridge since the first survey photograph in 1970, including building up the cutwater into a pedestrian refuge on the north side. The round arch, humpback and assortment of rubble and squared and tooled masonry indicate that this bridge is mid-eighteenth-century origin.

References:
Primary Sources:
1. PRONI OS/6/6/35/1-3 – Ordnance Survey Maps (1833, 1854, 1906)
2. Day, A and P. McWilliams, eds. “OS Memoirs of Ireland, Parishes of County Tyrone I, 1821, 1823, 1833-36, Vol 5.” Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1990.

Secondary Sources:
1. Knox, William J. “Decades of the Ulster Bank: 1836-1964.” Belfast: Board of Directors, Ulster Bank Limited, 1965.
2. McCutcheon, W. A. “The Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland,” Belfast: HMSO, 1980.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
D. Plan Form
F. Structural System
H-. Alterations detracting from building
J. Setting

Criteria for listing: historic interest

X. Local Interest

Evaluation

A two-span humpback road-over-river stone bridge carrying the Irishtown Road over the River Drumragh, built c.1750. This substantial eighteenth-century stone bridge displays good masonry, robust style and is well proportioned. In addition, the bridge has pedestrian refuges over the cutwaters at the midsection of a narrow single carriageway, as well as the extended abutments enclosing a single-storey dwelling. Its alternative name - King James’ Bridge - has historical associations with King James II’s retreat through County Tyrone in 1690 after the Battle of the Boyne and to an earlier crossing, although this bridge was constructed at a later date.