Looking Back: Over the bridge

Thanks to Eugene Brennan, here's a very interesting picture of the bridge and the market square area, taken by the Irish Air Corps, writes Brian Byrne. It's from the Military Archives and is a companion to one we published in 2017, taken from the other side. 

The photographs were taken on large coated glass plate negatives, so the definition is very good. When you zoom in close, you can see that almost everybody in the picture looks up at the Air Corps plane.

They include, from the left, a man leaning against one of the houses in market square, with his dog, two young women to the left of the bridge, near a pile of rubble that may have been used to fill in a hole where the former weighbridge had been, and two girls in the yard of what was later the Hibernian Bank building. At the top left, a man in the lane out of the market square appears to be walking away.

On the bridge itself are men with bicycles at either end, and a boy walking down the middle of the bridge, which at that time was half the width it is today and had no footpaths. On the right is a group of three men, one leaning against the telegraph pole.

One very clear thing is the amount of ground at the back of houses used to grow vegetables. 

From the picture published previously, we can date this one to probably 1948, thanks to Geraldine Nugent's detective work.

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