Peters Bridge

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

A single arched masonry bridge carrying the main road over a railway line, built of roughly coursed basalt rubble with a segmental archway of shaped sandstone voussoirs and a sandstone vault. Battered faces to abutments which break forward to each side of the archway. Parapets are returned square at the extremities, and the sandstone copings to the parapets are let down into the stonework below in five places; copings feather-edged. Humped carriageway.

SETTING: The bridge stands in an exposed
setting in a very rural area in the midst of agricultural land, with a single track railway running under it.

Historical information

Built to carry a road over the railway line of the Belfast and Ballymena Railway Company; engineer, Charles Lanyon; contractor William Dargan. The contract for the line was advertised in September 1845; awarded in October 1845; work started in November 1845; line opened in April 1848. Precise date of this bridge not known but it was presumably built around the same time as the one on the same line at Muckamore (HB20/13/008) some miles to the south, which bears the date 1847.

References – Primary Sources
1. OS Map 1858, Co Antrim 43.

Secondary Sources
1. J.R.L. Currie, The Northern Counties Railway, Vol I (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp 27-45.
2. W.A. McCutcheon, The Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland (HMSO, Belfast, 1980), pp 120-121.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

This is an example of early Victorian bridge engineering in stone, of unspoiled appearance, constructed under the direction of an important Irish engineer and architect, but typical of a plain type which has been repeated elsewhere.