What makes it worth pausing at is not the bridge itself but something lodged in its parapet wall: an armorial plaque and an inscribed date-stone, salvaged from the structure that was demolished to make way for it, recording that a stone bridge was built here in 1584 by Sir John Bedlow, more commonly rendered as Bellew, and his wife Ismay Nugent.

The original crossing was a 16th-century stone bridge, one of many constructed across Irish rivers during the Tudor period as road travel and the movement of goods became more systematically organised. It stood for roughly four hundred years before being pulled down in the late 1960s and replaced by the current concrete span. Whoever oversaw that replacement had the presence of mind to preserve the commemorative stones rather than break them up with the rest of the rubble. The armorial plaque, which would have displayed the heraldic bearings of the Bellew and Nugent families, and the date-stone were set into the new parapet, where they remain. Of the earlier bridge itself, nothing survives above ground; it was, by all accounts, completely demolished.

For anyone passing through on the N52, the stones are there to be seen in the parapet wall, a small and easily missed fragment of late Elizabethan patronage pressed into the side of a mid-20th-century concrete structure. The juxtaposition is quietly odd: a record of two specific people commissioning a specific piece of infrastructure in 1584, now embedded in a utilitarian replacement that acknowledges its own history almost accidentally.