The first Ordnance Survey map of Ireland, surveyed in 1839, records it plainly as "Monteen or Cody's Br.", a double designation that hints at a place layered with older identities. The bridge itself, a single-arch structure in stone, appears to date from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but the story of what stood here before it is considerably more interesting.

Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan quoted the notes of a Reverend Moore, set down in 1851, which recorded that "at Cody's bridge, stood a castle of the McOdos or Codys, alias Archdeacons." The family name Archdeacon, an anglicisation that sits alongside the Gaelic McOdo or Cody, points to one of the Old English settler families who took root in Kilkenny after the Norman arrival and gradually became woven into the local landscape. The castle is gone, but the bridge kept the name. There is further evidence that this crossing has been a place of some consequence for centuries: the Down Survey barony map of Gowran, produced between 1655 and 1656, marks a watermill in this same area. The Down Survey was a large-scale mapping project carried out after the Cromwellian conquest to document Irish landholdings, and its maps are among the earliest systematic cartographic records of the country. A mill and a castle in close proximity to a river crossing strongly suggest that a bridge of some kind existed here well before 1700, possibly on or very near the line of the present structure.