The inscription, carved in raised Roman script, closes with a direct appeal to the passing traveller: say a short prayer, it requests, so that the two who built the bridge might escape the pit of hell. It is not a sentiment you encounter often in seventeenth-century civic stonework.

The bridge itself was rebuilt in 1626 by James Butler, Baron of Dunboyne, and his wife Lady Margaret O'Brien, the Latin text recording that they raised up a bridge which had fallen and ornamented it with their arms. A separate line credits one Nicholas Cowley as the original constructor, though no further detail about him survives in the inscription. The armorial plaques, two of them, remain in place on the wall-face and almost certainly represent the Butler and O'Brien family arms referred to in the text. What no longer survives is the gate or arch that Butler added at the western end during the same rebuilding; it appeared in a late eighteenth-century sketch by the artist Gabriel Beranger, who travelled Ireland documenting antiquities, but has since disappeared. The limestone inscription plaque appears to be in its original position, a detail supported by the fact that two words of the text spill out onto an adjacent wall stone, suggesting it was set into the fabric of the bridge as it was built rather than moved there later. Holycross Abbey, a Cistercian foundation, stands immediately to the north, which gives some sense of the religious and social weight this crossing would have carried in the early modern period.