Callan, in County Kilkenny, quietly had two, and the lesser of the pair crossed not the River King but a millrace, the artificial channel cut to carry water to a working mill. This smaller crossing sat in the town's northern suburb, tucked between the main bridge to the south and the Augustinian friary to the east, carrying traffic along what was then known variously as Lower Bridge Street, Kenles Street, or Kells Street, a road that was itself simply the northward continuation of the town's main artery, Green Street.

The bridge and its associated millrace appear to stretch back to at least the sixteenth century, and the evidence for this comes from an unexpected source: the Ormond Deeds, a collection of legal and administrative documents connected to the powerful Butler family who dominated this part of Leinster. Leases from 1577, published by Edmund Curtis in 1941, refer repeatedly to properties in what the documents call the "hill of Callan", a phrase that seems to denote this northern suburb rather than any literal elevation. One lease places a rented property, described as a mease, at the north end of the great bridge. Others describe messuages, meaning houses with their outbuildings and plots of land, situated between both the bridges, a detail that confirms the two crossings were close enough together to serve as geographical anchors for property descriptions. A further lease from the same year mentions a garden near the "little bridge", which almost certainly refers to this millrace crossing rather than the main structure over the river.

What this cluster of documents reveals, almost incidentally, is how a working industrial waterway and a modest bridge could organise the geography of a suburban street in late medieval Ireland. The millrace was not decorative; it existed to power a mill, and the bridge existed because the millrace got in the way. That such infrastructure was already being used as a landmark in legal documents by 1577 suggests it had been part of the neighbourhood's fabric long enough to be taken for granted.