What looks, at a glance, like a single crossing of the River Inny is actually a layered structure, with a central single-arched span dating from around 1860 flanked by remnants of an older, multi-arched bridge at either side. Those older sections, visible to the northwest and southeast of the main arch, may incorporate stonework from the seventeenth century, making the whole structure something of a compressed record of how river crossings were built, rebuilt, and patched over generations.

The Inny forms the county boundary here, running between Longford and Westmeath, and a crossing at this point has clearly mattered for a long time. A 1682 source, cited by Gillespie and Moran, already describes a stone bridge here, which places the earliest documented structure well into the seventeenth century. The mid-nineteenth-century rebuild, which produced the current central arch, likely reflected either structural failure in the older bridge or the increased demands of traffic during a period when road improvement was widespread across rural Ireland. The remnant sections were not demolished but left in place, absorbed into the new arrangement rather than cleared away entirely.