The remaining arches extend eastward over dry ground, or what is now dry ground, where the river has largely silted up over the centuries. The bridge, in other words, is partly a bridge and partly a quiet record of how much the Nore has shifted and shrunken since the structure was first built.

A crossing at this location on the western edge of Ballyragget was already established by the mid-seventeenth century, when it appears on the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, a Cromwellian-era cartographic project that documented landholding across Ireland in considerable detail. The bridge described and built in roughly its current form, however, belongs to a later period. The segmental arches, meaning arches that form a shallow curve rather than a full semicircle, are faced with ashlar voussoirs, the precisely cut wedge-shaped stones that form an arch, and are dated to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The main body of the structure is coursed limestone rubble, with triangular cutwaters projecting from the piers to deflect the current. Writing in 1837, Samuel Lewis noted it as a good stone bridge of ten arches, suggesting it was well regarded in its day. Some medieval fabric may survive within the structure, a remnant of whatever earlier crossing preceded the present one. Since 1979, when a new bridge was built to the north to carry the main traffic flow, this older crossing has been left largely to itself, still usable but no longer burdened with the town's daily movement.