The bridge itself is a well-built structure, with arches of equal width, dressed voussoirs (the wedge-shaped stones that form the curve of each arch), and cut-water piers, the pointed projections that divide the current and protect the masonry from erosion. It was already standing when the first Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1839, and is considered probably eighteenth century in date.

The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, carried out in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest to catalogue land ownership across Ireland, recorded that Edward Masterson and a man named FitzRobert held some 600 acres in and around Ferns parish, including townlands whose names have since shifted or disappeared entirely: Monedurloge, Aghnemoe, Bolinerdroome, and Kavanasland among them. Their property was a working estate of some substance. It contained a castle, a church and abbey, a mill in good repair, a second mill already fallen into ruin, two weirs on the Bann, and, notably, two bridges. Doran's Bridge is one of the crossings that fits into this picture, sitting within an estate landscape that had already seen centuries of occupation and use by the time the surveyors arrived to write it down.