Overview
Most bridges are built to be crossed. This one was built to carry electricity. Around 1880 the Guinness brewery’s own engineering department threw a single cast-iron span across the River Liffey in the Strawberry Beds to run water pipes and power lines – generated from a mill-race turbine – up to Farmleigh, the Guinness family’s estate on the north bank, and to give workers living in Palmerstown a way over the river. Dublin.ie calls it ‘Dublin’s forgotten bridge’, and that’s about right: a ghostly, deckless Victorian structure in a quiet spot, known to locals as the Silver Bridge but also as the Guinness, Strawberry Beds or Lord Iveagh’s Bridge.
There’s no romance to how you visit it, so be clear-eyed: you can’t go on it. The deck is gone and the tunnel entrance at one end has collapsed. What you do is look at it from the riverside path – a ten-minute curiosity best folded into a Strawberry Beds walk or a visit to Farmleigh House, not a destination in its own right.
The Guinness bridge
Before the bridge there was a ford here, last recorded in 1773, and then ferries – an 1836 Ordnance Survey map shows two crossings on this stretch, one of them probably a private Guinness ferry. The bridge went up sometime between 1872, when Edward Cecil Guinness (great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, and later Lord Iveagh) bought Farmleigh, and 1890, when the first known photograph of it exists; the best guess is around 1880, the same time as the estate’s water and clock tower. It stored Liffey water up in that clock tower and drew hydro-electricity from the mills along the river.
Iveagh was described in his day as ‘an electricity loving peer’, and he and his Paris-raised wife Adelaide were known for a brilliantly lit house and glittering parties. The bridge was at first for family only. That changed after an estate worker, Joe Williams, drowned one wild night waiting for the ferry home; from then on the workers were let cross. It stayed in use until the deck was taken up and the bridge was closed in the 1970s, after which it was left to rust.
What’s there now
The bridge is a single-span cast-iron box truss, roughly 52 metres long and 4.5 metres wide, sitting on two stone abutments faced with cut limestone and trimmed with buttresses and round-headed arches. It’s a Protected Structure on the Fingal County Council register, and Fingal owns it. Between 2022 and 2023 the council spent just under €1.5 million conserving it – cleaning and repairing the stonework, fixing the metal structure and bearings – but, pointedly, without rebuilding the deck. So it has been saved, and it still can’t be walked.
Whether it ever reopens is an open question. South Dublin County Council commissioned a €15,000 feasibility study into restoring it for walkers and cyclists, and it’s pencilled in as a future link in a planned Liffey Valley Greenway between Lucan and Chapelizod. For now that remains a hope, not a date.
Seeing it
The best view is from the south bank, near the Angler’s Rest pub, where the full span and the stone gateway line up against the river. Early or late in the day the low light picks out the rivets and the limestone. That’s genuinely the whole visit.
Practical information
- Access: Closed to the public – no deck, no crossing. View from the riverside path on the south bank only.
- Cost: Free.
- Getting there: A short walk from bus stops at Robin Villas and Palmerstown Village (route 18, about 12 minutes) or Kennelsfort Road (about 14 minutes). Roadside parking near the Angler’s Rest is limited.
- Nearby: Farmleigh House and its estate are about 10 minutes’ walk – free grounds and gardens, with paid guided tours of the house – and the Knockmaree Dolmen and Anna Livia Bridge are each roughly half an hour on foot.
If you’re making a morning of it, do the bridge first as a quick stop from the Angler’s Rest, then walk up to Farmleigh, where the grounds are free and there’s a café – the house and the bridge it was built to serve make far more sense seen together than the deckless span does alone.