The structure built in 1896 is solid, conventional masonry, yet it is still called Wooden Bridge, after a far older and rather more unusual crossing that once stood roughly 150 metres upstream.

The original bridge, recorded as 'Wooden Bridge' on the 1835 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, was a notably primitive construction for its era. Oak beams were laid across ten simple, pyramidal stone piers and then overlain with wicker and gravel, producing a surface that was in effect a compressed lattice rather than solid decking. This combination of materials, at once load-bearing and flexible, kept the crossing functional well into the late nineteenth century before it was finally replaced by the stone bridge in 1896. Nothing of the original structure survives today, though its general character is documented in the work of O'Keeffe and Simington, published in 1991.

What makes the site quietly interesting is the persistence of the old name on a bridge that shares none of the original's materials or construction logic. The 1896 bridge simply inherited the designation from its predecessor, in the way that Irish place names and local usage often preserve the memory of something that has long since vanished from the ground. The ten pyramidal stone piers, the wicker weave, the gravel surface, all of it is gone, but the word 'Wooden' still marks the crossing on maps and on signposts, a small ghost of an older way of spanning a river.