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

Single-arch road bridge over the former Great Northern Railway branch line from Goraghwood to Warrenpoint, built in 1852–54 as part of the Newry and Armagh Railway. It sits on the east side of Kilmonaghan Road, just over a mile north-east of Mullaghglass, County Armagh, and carries a short access lane eastward to No. 11 Kilmonaghan Road — a farm dwelling that predated the railway and would otherwise have been cut off from the road to the west. The railway line itself is now largely obscured beneath a thick band of mature trees.

The bridge is robustly engineered and appears largely intact, retaining much of its original character. The walling throughout — including the bridge itself, the retaining walls and the parapets — is squared, random-coursed, rock-faced stone. A plain projecting stone string course runs below the parapets on each face. The coping consists of large, regular, rectangular cut stones. At the east end of the southern parapet, a tall curved stone wall features coping stones laid on edge, forming castellations. The central structure carries a tall semi-circular headed arch with voussoirs.

The bridge was designed by railway engineer John Godwin, who was also engineer for the Ulster Railway Company, the Belfast and County Down Railway, and the Newry, Warrenpoint and Rostrevor Railway. Born in Swansea, Godwin became the first professor of civil engineering at Queen's College Belfast, serving from 1850 to 1858, while continuing to work professionally throughout that period. He later retired to Tamnaharry House near Warrenpoint, where he died in 1869.

Construction of this section of line had a complicated and drawn-out history. An Act to build a railway between Newry and Enniskillen, routed via Armagh, was passed in 1845 on the eve of the Great Famine. The first sod was cut at Moorevale in Glasdrummond townland — approximately one mile south of this bridge — on 17 August 1846, when around 500 men were employed. The project was seen as an important source of employment at a time of acute scarcity. The initial contractor was the Carlow-born William Dargan (1799–1867), the celebrated building contractor and railway entrepreneur, a pupil of Thomas Telford and responsible for numerous roads, railways, canals and docks in Ireland and Britain. Dargan had won the contract for Ireland's first railway, the Dublin and Kingstown, in 1834, and his success there secured him a substantial share of Irish railway construction contracts in the 1840s and 1850s, including parts of the Dublin and Belfast Junction Railway. Dargan employed 500 to 600 men at 10 shillings per week on the Newry line, but his workforce went on strike in 1846 demanding the same 12 shillings he paid on the Ulster Railway. Dargan argued that the men on the Newry line were unskilled and did not know how to use a short-handled shovel or pickaxe, but undertook to pay them more once they became sufficiently skilled. The men eventually returned to work on that basis.

Works were suspended in September 1847, by which point only the earthworks between Newry and Goragh had been completed. Dargan was not involved in the subsequent completion of the line, though he had offered to finish it as far as Goragh for £11,000 in 1852, and there was also a short-lived proposal that the line be leased to him to manage. The delays and cost overruns have been attributed to mismanagement and misappropriation of funds, with costs rising to a level many times greater than comparable railways.

The project was relaunched in 1853 as the Newry and Armagh Railway, with the original ambition to reach Enniskillen curtailed. Priority was given to completing the section between Newry and Goraghwood, where the Dublin and Belfast Junction Railway (running between Drogheda and Portadown) had established a station. By August 1852, 150 men were engaged night and day on the works. In January 1853, 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 finish the work, with only one bridge still to be erected. The construction was hazardous: at least two workmen are known to have been killed during this phase. In September 1852, a man named Patrick Lucey was crushed when a bank collapsed at a cutting in the townland of Goragh, most likely near the location of this bridge. The line as far as Goraghwood formally opened on 1 March 1854 in the presence of a large assembly of spectators, with an engine that had featured at the Dublin Exhibition of 1853 covering the distance to Goraghwood in what was considered an impressive ten minutes.

No further construction took place for several years as funding was sought for the remaining sections. Godwin took no further part in the railway's construction. George Willoughby Hemans was subsequently appointed engineer-in-chief, with Richard Hassard as resident engineer. Hemans surveyed the line from Goragh to Armagh in October 1856, work began in the closing months of 1858, and the full line reached completion in 1864. The 22-and-a-half-mile Newry and Armagh Railway was thus constructed over a period stretching from 1845 to 1864. The railway never generated the revenues its promoters had hoped for, and the directors were persuaded to merge with the Great Northern Railway in 1879, the line becoming the Armagh, Newry and Warrenpoint Branch. Ten years later, on 12 June 1889, a catastrophic accident just outside Armagh killed 80 people and injured 260 more — the worst accident ever to occur on Ireland's railways. The line was closed progressively: between Armagh and Markethill in 1933, between Markethill and Goraghwood in 1957, and finally the section where this bridge stands — between Goraghwood and Newry, together with the extension to Warrenpoint — in 1965.

The bridge is a surviving remnant of the once-flourishing Newry–Armagh railway and is of local interest, with architectural value in its style, proportion, structural system and setting, and historical value reflecting its age, authenticity, historic associations, and the authorship of a notable engineer.