Charles Blacker Vignoles, the Irish picturesque, and the unbuilt military railway to Berehaven, 1836-38
chapter
posted on 2016-01-04, 15:52authored byRichard J. Butler
Charles Blacker Vignoles (1793-1875) rose early – well before dawn – on the morning of Friday,
16 December 1836, from his lodgings in Bantry, Co. Cork. Before lunch he had surveyed no
fewer than three mountain passes. His mission was a grand and romantic one: to find the best
route for a major railway that would connect London with New York, via Holyhead, Dublin, and
a good harbour on the western seaboard of Ireland. He had claimed before a House of
Commons inquiry in 1835 that Ireland, his native country, could ‘become the great highway of
nations from the Old to the New World – the thoroughfare between the two hemispheres’.2 His
proposed railway to Berehaven, had it been built, would have called for engineering structures of
an unparalleled scale and ambition – for its time the highest railway bridge in the world, and the
longest and tallest bridge across open sea. Furthermore, Vignoles conceived of his proposed
great feats of engineering as works of art that would take their place in the rural picturesque
landscape of the mountainous regions of west Cork. Using a wealth of primary sources this essay
will tell, for the first time, the full story of Ireland’s most extraordinary unbuilt railway.
History
Citation
Narkiewicz, F;NicGhabhann, N;O’Donovan, D, Charles Blacker Vignoles, the Irish picturesque, and the unbuilt military railway to Berehaven, 1836-38, 'Mapping new territories in art and architectural history: essays in honour of Roger Stalley', 2018, Brepols N.V.
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of History