Green's Bridge

Green's Bridge, or Greensbridge, is an elegant, Palladian-style, limestone arch bridge that crosses the river Nore in Kilkenny, Ireland. The bridge is a series of five elliptical arches of high-quality carved limestone masonry with a two-arch culvert to the east. Its graceful profile, architectural design value, and civil engineering heritage endow it with national significance. Historian Maurice Craig described it as one of the five-finest bridges in Ireland. It was built by William Colles and designed by George Smith, and was completed in 1766. The bridge was 250 years old in 2016.

The bridge's location on the north side of Kilkenny has been a ford since at least the middle of the 10th century. The first bridge there was built in the 12th century by settlers from Flanders and has been rebuilt many times due to frequent floods. The bridge itself is known from medieval times; it was described as "the Bridge of Kilkenny", "the big bridge of Kilkenny", and "Grines Bridge"; the origin of the name Green's Bridge, however, is uncertain. The "Great Flood of 1763" destroyed the previous bridge.

Green's Bridge was designed by George Smith and built by William Colles. Colles was the owner of a marble works and an inventor of machinery for sawing, boring, and polishing limestone. Smith designed an almost-true copy of the Bridge of Tiberius (Italian: Ponte di Augusto e Tiberio) in Rimini, Italy, as described by Andrea Palladio in I quattro libri dell'architettura (The Four Books of Architecture) (1570). Parapets were added during a renovation in 1835.

Temporary works to the bridge, which is currently used as a road bridge, carried out in 1969 have had a negative impact and the general appraisal is that it needs restoration. The estimated the cost of the bridge was £2,828.