Bridge leading to 11 Kilmonaghan Road Goragh Newry Co. Down BT35 6QF

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Single arch road bridge over former GNR Branch Line Goraghwood to Warrenpoint on the Newry and Armagh Railway line (IHR 00478:005:00), located on E side of Kilmonaghan Road, just over 1 mile NE of Mullaghglass, Co Armagh.

Semi-circular headed arch with voussoirs carrying local access road to E to No.11 Kilmonaghan Road (HB16/21/096).

Squared random-coursed rock-faced stone walling to bridge, retaining walls and parapet. Plain, projecting stone string course below parapets on each face. Coping consists of large, regular, rectangular cut stones.
Tall, curved stone wall to E end of southern parapet with coping stones laid on edge, forming castellations.

Materials:
Random-coursed rock-faced stone

Setting:
Located to immediate SE of No.15 Kilmonaghan Road, laneway leads to No.11 Kilmonaghan Road, a single farm dwelling. The railway line is now largely obscured beneath a thick band of mature trees.

Historical information

The current bridge, built to designs by railway engineer John Godwin, most likely dates from 1852-4 and carries a short laneway over the former Newry and Armagh Railway, providing access to a domestic dwelling that pre-existed the railway and would otherwise have been cut off from the access road to the west.

The 22 and a half-mile Newry & Armagh Railway was constructed between 1845 and 1864. However, the section of the line between Newry and Goraghwood was the first to be built and was completed some years before the rest of the line, earthworks being carried out 1846-7 and further works between 1852 and 1854. The initial contractor was William Dargan, the work being completed, following a hiatus, by Messrs Moore Brothers. The company’s engineer throughout the construction of this section of line was John Godwin. (Railway companies often appointed both an ‘engineer-in-chief’ and one or more ‘resident engineers’ as assistants. However, Godwin appears to have been the only engineer employed by the company on this section of line.)

An Act to construct a railway line between Newry and Enniskillen, to be routed via Armagh, was passed in 1845, on the eve of the Great Famine. Raising funds proved challenging, but the first sod was cut at Moorevale in Glasdrummond townland (c1 mile to the S of the current bridge) on 17th August 1846 and 500 men were initially employed, the railway being seen as an important source of employment at a time when resources were scarce.

The contractor for the initial work was Carlow-born William Dargan (1799-1867), the celebrated building contractor and railway entrepreneur, pupil of Thomas Telford and responsible for numerous roads, railways, canals and docks in Ireland and also in Britain. Dargan won the contract to build Ireland’s first railway line, the Dublin and Kingstown, in 1834 and his successful completion of this line led him to win a substantial share of Irish railway construction contracts in the 1840s and 50s, including parts of the Dublin & Belfast Junction Railway.

The company’s engineer for the Newry and Enniskillen Railway was Swansea-born John Godwin, also engineer for the Ulster Railway Company, the Belfast and County Down Railway and the Newry, Warrenpoint and Rostrevor Railway. Godwin became the first professor of civil engineering at Queen’s College Belfast (1850-1858), but continued to work professionally, including completing works on the Newry to Goraghwood railway, until his retirement. Godwin retired to ‘Tamnaharry’ house near Warrenpoint, where he died in 1869.

Dargan employed 5-600 men at 10s per week, but his workers went on strike in 1846 to obtain the same wages (12s) as Dargan paid on the Ulster Railway. Dargan stated that the men on the Newry line were unskilled and did not know how to use a short-handled shovel or pick-axe but he would pay them more when they became skilled and ‘able to do a proper day’s work’. The men eventually returned to work on this basis. William Dargan was not associated with the completion of this section of the Newry & Armagh Railway after 1847, although he offered to complete the railway as far as Goragh for £11,000 in 1852 and there was also a short-lived proposal that the line would be leased to him to manage.

Works on the railway were suspended in September 1847, with only the earthworks between Newry and Goragh completed. John Campbell’s history of the line points to mismanagement and indeed misappropriation of funds, as reasons why the Newry to Goraghwood section of line became delayed and costs rose to a level many times greater than other comparable railways (Campbell).

The railway languished incomplete for some years, and the project was relaunched as the ‘Newry and Armagh Railway’ in 1853, the original ambition to build a railway as far as Enniskillen having been curtailed. Completion of the section of line between Newry and Goraghwood (where the Dublin and Belfast Junction Railway (Drogheda to Portadown) had established a station to which the new line was to be connected) was prioritised and by August 1852 there were ‘150 men engaged night and day on the works’. In January 1853, John Godwin reported that ‘a few weeks of favourable weather’ would allow the contractors, Messrs Moore Brothers (‘eminent’ Irish railway contractors who also worked on several other lines), to complete the works, with only one bridge remaining to be erected. The work was hazardous, however, and at least two workmen are known to have been killed in the construction of this section. A workman named Patrick Lucey was crushed when a bank collapsed while working at a cutting in the townland of Goragh, most likely near the location of the current bridge, in September 1852.

The formal opening of the line as far as Goraghwood took place on 1st March 1854 ‘in the presence of a large assemblage of spectators’, with an engine that had featured in the Dublin Exhibition of 1853 carrying the passengers to Goraghwood in an impressive-for-the-time ten minutes. No further work on the railway took place for several years as attempts were made to secure the necessary funds, and John Godwin did not play any further part in the construction of the railway.

George Willoughby Hemans was subsequently employed by the Newry and Armagh Railway as engineer-in-chief, assisted by resident engineer Richard Hassard. Hemans surveyed the line from Goragh to Armagh in October 1856 and work began in the closing months of 1858, reaching completion in 1864.

The construction of the Newry to Armagh railway was ‘protracted and difficult’ (McCutcheon) and the railway did not subsequently bring in the hoped-for revenues. The directors were therefore easily persuaded to merge with the Great Northern Railway in 1879 (as the Armagh, Newry and Warrenpoint Branch). Ten years after this amalgamation on 12 June 1889, a devastating accident on the railway, just outside Armagh, caused the deaths of 80 people. 260 more were injured in the worst accident ever to occur on Ireland’s railways.

The line was closed between Armagh and Markethill in 1933 and in 1957 the section between Markethill and Goraghwood also closed. The final section, where the current bridge is located, between Goraghwood and Newry (together with an extension to Warrenpoint) was closed in 1965.

References:
Primary Sources:
1. PRONI OS/6/2/22/1 First edition Six Inch OS map (1835)
2. Newry Telegraph, 22nd July 1845
3. Newry Telegraph, 18th August 1846
4. Saunders’s Newsletter, 19th August 1846
5. Saunders’s Newsletter, 29th September 1846
6. Armagh Guardian, 12th October 1847
7. Belfast Newsletter, 6th August 1852
8. Belfast Newsletter, 13th September 1852
9. Newry Telegraph, 8th February 1853
10. Morning Chronicle, 4th March 1854
11. Dublin Evening Packet, 28th October 1856
12. Newry Herald, 24th July 1858
13. The Irishman, 8th January 1859
14. PRONI OS/6/2/22/2 Second edition Six Inch OS map (1861)
15. Armagh Guardian, 26th August 1864
16. Northern Whig, 19th January 1869
17. PRONI OS/6/2/22/3 Third edition Six Inch OS map (1906)
18. PRONI OS/6/2/22/4 Fourth edition Six Inch OS map (1955)

Secondary Sources:
19. Campbell, John (1988) ‘The Newry and Armagh Railway and Lissummon Tunnel’ “Before I Forget…”: Journal of the Poyntzpass and District Local History Society, Nov, No 2 pp.67-80, 83
20. Dictionary of Irish Architects (www.dia.ie)
21. Dictionary of Irish Biography (www.dib.ie)
22. McCutcheon, W A ‘The Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland’ Belfast: HMSO (1980)

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
F. Structural System
J. Setting

Criteria for listing: historic interest

R. Age
S. Authenticity
U. Historic Associations
V. Authorship
X. Local Interest

Evaluation

Single arch road bridge over former GNR Branch Line from Goraghwood-Warrenpoint on the Newry & Armagh Railway line (IHR 00478:005:00), located on E side of Kilmonaghan Road, approximately 1 mile NE of Mullaghglass, Co Armagh. It carries a local access road to the E to No.11 Kilmonaghan Road (HB16/21/096).
This robustly engineered bridge was constructed in 1852-54, built to designs by railway engineer John Godwin, who was the first professor of civil engineering at Queen’s College Belfast (1850-1858). Work on this section of line was commenced by Carlow-born William Dargan (1799-1867) (responsible for the initial earthworks including cuttings) and completed by the Irish railway contractors the Messrs Moore brothers (who completed the work on the bridges). Dargan was a celebrated building contractor, railway entrepreneur and pupil of Thomas Telford who was responsible for numerous roads, railways, canals & docks in Britain and Ireland.
The bridge appears largely intact, retaining much authenticity with its squared, random-coursed rock-faced stone walling, stone string course and stone block parapet over a tall, semi-circular headed arch with voussoirs.
This bridge is a survivor of the once flourishing Newry-Armagh railway line which was constructed between 1845 and 1864 and is of local interest.