What makes it worth pausing over is a question of timing: the bridge appears clearly on John Rocque's detailed map of Dublin from 1760, yet it is entirely absent from the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, which were among the most thorough cartographic exercises carried out in seventeenth-century Ireland. That gap of roughly a century places the bridge's construction somewhere between those two surveys, making the stonework itself the most useful record of when it was built.

The physical evidence is readable once you know what to look for. The sidings, the vertical faces that carry the parapet, are finished in a style described as late hammer-dressed, meaning the stone was worked with a hammer to produce a relatively even but textured surface, a technique associated with later bridge construction in Ireland. The coping stones along the top are chamfered, cut at an angle along their edges, which was both a practical and a common decorative choice. The bridge has three breakwaters, the projecting triangular or rounded piers that deflect the flow of water and protect the structure from debris and flood pressure. On the west side, the arches are round segmental in form, meaning they describe only a portion of a full circle rather than a complete semicircle, a shape that allowed builders to keep the roadway relatively level without raising the arch too high above the waterline.

The bridge is accessible without any particular effort, sitting as it does on a public road through Chapelizod village. The Liffey here runs between steep, wooded banks, and the underside of the bridge is most clearly seen from the riverside paths that form part of the broader Liffey Valley parklands. The west side, with its segmental arches, is worth examining directly if the water level is low enough to expose the full curve of the stonework. The breakwaters are visible from the bank. There is no single dramatic season for a visit; the structure is permanent and legible year-round, though lower autumn or winter water levels can make the masonry easier to examine at close range.