The village is well known for its thatched cottages and medieval ecclesiastical remains, but the story of its crossing over the River Maigue is considerably murkier than most visitors realise. The bridge that stands there today is not the one that gave the site its historical weight.

The older structure was recorded by Samuel Lewis in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, published in 1837, where he noted that a bridge of fourteen arches had been built at Adare by the fifth earl of Kildare. The Urban Survey of Limerick, compiled by Bradley and others in 1989, repeated this account while adding a cautious qualification, noting that the attribution may actually point to a Desmond earl rather than a Kildare one, a distinction that matters given the bitter rivalry between those two great Munster and Leinster dynasties in the late medieval period. The survey was equally direct about the structure itself, stating simply that the present bridge is of more recent date. In other words, whatever impressive fourteen-arched crossing once spanned the Maigue here has long since been replaced, and the exact circumstances of its disappearance are not recorded in the available sources.

The current bridge sits within the village of Adare, which is easily reached on the N21 road between Limerick city and Abbeyfeale. The Maigue is a modest river at this point, and the present crossing gives little outward indication of the more ambitious structure it succeeded. For anyone with an interest in medieval infrastructure, it is worth pausing on the bridge and considering the scale implied by fourteen arches, a span that would have served both practical and symbolic purposes for whichever powerful earl commissioned it. The question of whether to credit Kildare or Desmond remains, for now, unresolved.