Railway Bridge, Crawfordsburn Country Park, Crawfordsburn, Bangor, Co Down

Railway Bridge, Crawfordsburn

A single-arch masonry and brick railway bridge built by the Belfast, Holywood & Bangor Railway in the early 1860s to a design by Charles Lanyon. It is constructed to a high standard with a variety of dressed faces and detailing of the quoins and voussoirs demonstrating the quality of design and construction achievable by mid-19th-century railway architects. The brick arch reflects the increasingly common practice in the later 1800s for using brick on the less visible components of a bridge. This example is of structural interest in being a particularly good example of a skew arch. The use of brick in such arches would have been both quicker and cheaper than more conventional stone blocks. The bridge has group value with the viaduct a short distance along the same embankment and represents the development of the railways as North Down settlements expanded in the nineteenth century.

The bridge is a highly skewed single-arch structure that carries the double-track Belfast-Bangor railway over a single-lane accommodation road on the left bank of Crawfordsburn Glen. The abutments and piers are of randomly-sized rock-faced sandstone blocks with rusticated, margined and vee-jointed quoins. A chamfered sandstone string course, each block of which is rusticated and margined, runs through the arch at spring level and around the tops of the quoins. The arch is of semicircular profile with vermiculated, margined and vee-jointed voussoirs, all of which splay out to form the spandrels. A string course detailed as that through the arch runs across the tops of the spandrels at arch crown level. The arch soffit is of skew-set dark-purple bricks which spring from a serrated sandstone course along the top of each string course.

The parapets are of roughly-faced random blocks with finely-dressed sandstone copings, all in sandstone. There are three shallow pilasters along each parapet—one approximately in line with each quoin and one directly over the crown. The parapets continue out beyond the outer pilasters and have margined rustication at their ends. A modern two-bar galvanised steel handrail is affixed to the top of each parapet. A low cement-rendered wall continues for a short distance beyond the west end of the south parapet to retain the track ballast.

Shallow tapered buttresses at the south-west and north-west ends of the bridge are of rock-faced random sandstone blocks, embellished with quoins detailed as those on the abutments. Slightly battered wing walls retain the embankment at either end of the east side of the bridge. Their stonework is as the buttress and all are coped with dressed sandstone blocks chamfered along their top edges. The south-east wing wall makes a right-angle turn at its bottom end and continues down the slope as an embankment retaining wall. It continues across the stream at the bottom of the slope before terminating a short distance up the other side.

Just in front of where the bridge crosses the stream is a masonry culvert which conveys the stream under the embankment for a distance of approximately 70 metres. It is of random rubble masonry construction, with a semicircular arch, the voussoirs of which are rusticated and margined. It is similarly detailed on its downstream and upstream faces where it emerges from under the bank.

The high earthen embankment continues eastwards to where the railway crosses the deepest part of the glen as a five-arch viaduct. The bridge spans Crawfordsburn Glen in a wooded area of the Country Park.

Although the railway arrived in Holywood from Belfast in 1848, it was not until 1862 that the Belfast, Holywood & Bangor Railway began construction of the Holywood-Bangor section on which this bridge is located. The line eventually opened in May 1865. The line's consultant architect was Charles Lanyon, and it was probably he who designed the structures along it. When the line opened, the Belfast & County Down Railway sold their Belfast-Holywood section to the Belfast, Holywood & Bangor Railway. In 1873, the entire line was leased back to the Belfast & County Down Railway and transferred outright to them in 1884. In 1948, the line was taken over by the Ulster Transport Authority and then by Northern Ireland Railways in 1968. It is now operated by Translink. Originally the line was a single track but it was eventually doubled. The width of the original abutments was such, however, that no widening of the bridge was necessary.