Barbican Bridge, Castle Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim

Barbican Bridge, Castle Street, Glenarm

A simple rubble stone road bridge built in 1713, featuring two segmental arches, stone parapets and pointed stone cutwaters. The bridge originally carried the main road from Larne over the Glenarm River and now provides access from Castle Street to the Barbican entrance of Glenarm Castle demesne.

The bridge is constructed entirely in rubble stone with a slight off-centre hump. It has two large segmental arches formed from roughly dressed stones. Both the east and west faces are largely identical, each featuring a central cutwater that rises to the spring point of the arches and is topped with a pyramidal cap. These cutwaters rest against shallow buttresses. The base appears to have been strengthened in recent years. The stone parapets, which lack coping stones, rise to approximately 1.2 metres on either side, with large sections now covered in ivy growth.

The bridge displays an asymmetrical appearance when viewed from the side, suggesting it may once have been longer before land reclamation shortened its span at both ends.

Built in 1713 at a cost of £100, this bridge replaced an earlier structure from 1682 that had been swept away in a flood. It originally carried the main road from Larne (now the Vennel and Castle Street) over the Glenarm River to what is now Straidkilly Road. The road then had to skirt close to Glenarm Castle through its immediate grounds. This remained the case until 1813, when a new bridge was built to the north, allowing traffic to bypass the castle grounds via Toberwine Street. The construction of the Coast Road in the mid-1830s enabled complete bypass of the village centre. In 1824–25, with the old bridge now superseded, the Countess of Antrim and her husband Edmund Phelps McDonnell added the Barbican gate and walling to its west side, closing off the demesne from Castle Street traffic.

The asymmetrical shape suggests the bridge was originally longer, with land possibly reclaimed at both ends and the river course straightened. This is supported by the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1835, which mention three semicircular arches, though this conflicts with John O'Hara's 1779 map, which shows two arches.