At the point where the Blackwater River makes a decisive turn southward at Cappoquin, there is a bridge that no longer exists above ground, yet remains a registered archaeological site. Nothing is visible at ground level today, but the river bend marks the spot where a succession of crossings once carried traffic across one of Munster's great waterways.

The first recorded bridge here was a wooden structure built before 1643 by Sir Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, who was one of the most powerful landowners in seventeenth-century Ireland and accumulated vast estates across Munster. That original timber crossing was rebuilt in 1666, and it is most likely this later structure that appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, a cartographic record that captured Ireland's built landscape at a moment of considerable change. The bridge was removed in 1850, leaving nothing that a walker along the riverbank could point to today. What remains is the historical fact of the crossing, situated at a geographically logical but now largely unmarked spot where the river's change in direction made a bridge both necessary and strategically useful for anyone moving goods or people through the Blackwater valley.