An Ancestral Landmark

Nestor’s Bridge, a one-arch stone bridge in the countryside of East Clare, was named for the family of my great-grandmother, Mary Nestor McNamara. Land records obtained from the Irish government in Dublin indicate that Mary’s father, John Nestor, farmed two plots of land adjacent to the bridge as far back as the 1850s.

John’s father, Darby Nestor, was also recorded as farming near the bridge in the Tithe Applotment Books, a set of land records compiled in 1825.

The Nestor name was officially attached to the bridge when the British government, ruling in Ireland at the time, conducted its first Ordnance Survey in the late 1830s. The government mapmakers endeavored to collect the commonly used names of local landmarks. As Nestor’s Bridge can be found in the “name books” the surveyors carried in the 1830s, the name must have been in general use among the local population for many years prior to that.

A historian in the local studies center of the County Clare Library told me that the bridge was probably named for its builder. So it’s likely some ancestors of mine, members of the Nestor family, built the bridge at some point in the 1700s.