And a brother at Waterloo
The Iron Duke
The bridge was built by Tom Boyse of Bannow House early in the nineteenth century. Boyse had a brother who fought in the British army at Waterloo in 1815 and came back grievously wounded - the injuries shortened his life. Boyse, who was already a thoughtful and unusually fair landlord by the standards of the day, pushed for the new bridge to be named for the Duke of Wellington, victor of that battle. The Ordnance Survey kept the older townland name beneath. Two centuries on, your sat-nav still flickers between Ballyowen and Wellingtonbridge depending on which database it is reading.
150,000 tonnes a year, then nothing
The beet trains
From the late 1970s until 2006 Wellingtonbridge was the largest sugar-beet loading depot in Ireland. Between September and January, six days a week, six or seven freight trains a day hauled beet up the South Wexford line to the sugar factory at Mallow. When Greencore closed Mallow at the end of the 2005 season, the trains stopped. The Rosslare-Waterford passenger service limped on until September 2010, when Iarnród Éireann replaced it with a Bus Éireann route. The station building and the loading bay are still standing. Walk past on a quiet afternoon and you can hear what is not there.
A Cistercian abbey owed to a storm
Tintern across the water
Five kilometres south of the bridge, on the western shore of Bannow Bay, sits Tintern de Voto - Tintern of the Vow. William Marshal, sailing back from France in storm in the 1190s, vowed that wherever he made landfall he would build an abbey. He landed at Bannow. Cistercians from the Welsh Tintern came over to staff it. The abbey ran for nearly four hundred years until the Dissolution, then became a fortified house for the Colclough family for another four hundred. It is open to the public now and the trails around it - Bannow Bay, Foxboro, the walled garden - are the best half-day on this part of the coast.