Yet early illustrations of this six-arched sandstone bridge over the River Dalua, just north of its confluence with the Allow, reveal exactly that arrangement in its abutments. The upstream side originally featured pointed cutwaters, the angled projections that deflect river current from the piers, which rose to parapet height and formed canopied refuge niches. Those niches were once fronted with inscribed limestone slabs, each carrying a verse of a poem, and local tradition held that the stone came from a gazebo built by the Earl of Egmont, possibly quarried from Windmill Hill. When the bridge was widened by some 4.5 metres in the mid-nineteenth century, the canopies were removed, but the inscribed slabs were not discarded; they were reused as coping stone in the new northwest parapet wall, where they remain today, repurposed and largely unnoticed.

The bridge as it stands was erected in 1760, as recorded on one of two plaques still visible in the southeast parapet wall. That inscription names Richard Purcell of Kanturk and Arthur Bastable of Castlebretrige as the trustees appointed to oversee its construction, and notes that the same two men had previously overseen the erection of Blackwater Bridge at Gortmore in 1757. The second plaque is more curious still, recording the comparative costs of building Westminster Bridge in London and Essex Bridge in Dublin, a piece of civic context that seems oddly ambitious for a rural river crossing. The bridge itself is built from random-rubble sandstone with limestone detailing, the pier bases cut from ashlar limestone, and the voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form each arch, are large, well-dressed, and prominent. A seventh arch on the southwest side has been entirely built around and is no longer visible. The site has a longer history beneath it: a single bridge appears on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656 at or near this location, and local tradition suggests the eighteenth-century structure replaced not only a timber bridge but also an earlier one whose fabric incorporated stone from the precincts of Kanturk Castle nearby.