The later of the two structures, sitting to the south-west of Abbey Owney, was eventually fitted with concrete breakwaters and timber planks on iron girders to serve as a livestock crossing, a makeshift adaptation that rather underlines how thoroughly it had been retired from its original purpose.

The story of when and why these bridges were built has been pieced together largely through old cartography. Researchers Simington and O'Keeffe, writing in 1991, noted that Herman Moll's map of 1714 shows only a single bridge at Abington, while Taylor and Skinner's road map of 1778, surveying the route from Loughrea to Bruff, depicts two. That gap in the record led to the working conclusion that the present road bridge to the east was constructed somewhere in that intervening period, with the older seventeenth-century crossing widened around the same time. The eighteenth-century bridge to the south-west appears, on this reading, to be the newer of the pair, built to serve a road that has itself since vanished.

The ghost of that road is still faintly legible in the landscape. A linear cropmark, visible in aerial photography, traces the course of a disused roadway running southward from the Mulkear towards the bridge, corresponding to the route shown on Taylor and Skinner's 1778 map. Cropmarks appear when buried or compressed features beneath a field affect how vegetation grows above them, producing variations in colour or height that become visible from altitude. The bridge itself is no longer in use, so visitors approaching from the fields to the south are essentially following the alignment of an eighteenth-century road to a crossing that has not carried ordinary traffic for a considerable time. The area around Abbey Owney rewards a careful look at the ground as much as at the structures themselves.