Surface
The original surface of Carrigrohane Straight was limestone. In 1927, the County Council and Corporation, who both controlled sections of the Straight, laid reinforced concrete. The Straight was one of the first concrete road surfaces in Ireland, or even Great Britain. In the early days, concrete surfaces were laid in slabs, with expansion joints of bitumen to take up expansion and contractions as the temperature affected them. The reinforced concrete consisted of a layer of mesh steel covered with concrete in sections approximately 20 to 30 feet (6.1 to 9.1 m) long, and several inches thick. Concrete was used because it was thought to be suitable for boggy ground. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, a number of concrete roads were constructed over bog in Northern Ireland, for example the Ballymena to Ballymoney road
The South of Ireland Asphalt Company (S.I.A.C.) was engaged in the surfacing of the Straight, and the concrete was hand laid. After the closure of the Muskerry Tram, the tracks were removed in 1935, and the area they occupied was then concreted, adding about 10 feet (3.0 m) to the width of the road. In recent years, Cork Corporation has covered this section with tar macadam, but the section outside the city still has the original concrete, and the extra width of concrete laid after the tram tracks were removed. This can be seen on the south side of the road.
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Famous quotes containing the word surface:
“In the cold of Europe, under prudish northern fogs, except when slaughter is afoot, you only glimpse the crawling cruelty of your fellow men. But their rottenness rises to the surface as soon as they are tickled by the hideous fevers of the tropics.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“All beauties contain, like all possible phenomena, something eternal and something transitory,—something absolute and something particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the common surface of different sorts of beauty. The particular element of each beauty comes from the emotions, and as we each have our own particular emotions, so we have our beauty.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)