The current crossing dates to 1832, but it was built on a spot already well established as a river crossing by the seventeenth century, and quite possibly long before that.

What we know of the earlier structure comes largely from a single remarkable source: a drawing made by the English artist Francis Place in 1698. Place visited Ireland in the late seventeenth century and recorded several Dublin-area scenes with careful attention to their surroundings, and his depiction of this crossing shows a four-arched stone bridge spanning the Dodder at this very point. Four arches would have made it a substantial structure for its time, designed to handle the width and seasonal unpredictability of the Dodder, a river known for rising sharply after heavy rain. That earlier bridge is referenced in local historical accounts by Maher and Hegarty, writing in the 1930s, who drew on Place's drawing as documentary evidence of the crossing's earlier form. The 1832 rebuild replaced whatever remained of that seventeenth-century structure, though it followed the same alignment across the river.

The bridge sits on the Donnybrook Road where it crosses the Dodder, a short distance south of the city centre and easily reached on foot or by bus. The river here runs through a relatively open stretch, and from the parapet you can look upstream or down without too much obstruction. There is nothing to mark the historical significance of the site, so the pleasure of it is largely imaginative: standing where travellers have crossed since at least the 1600s, on a river that has not much changed its course, even if the stone underfoot has.