Six semicircular arches carry the road across the water, and between them rise tall pointed breakwaters, the angled projections of masonry designed to split the current and protect the piers from the force of the river. The southern side of the bridge has been widened at some point, a detail that speaks to the practical pressures of increasing traffic over the generations, and which gives the structure a slightly asymmetrical profile when viewed from the bank.

Bridges of this type, with their rounded arches and tapered cutwater piers, are characteristic of Irish road engineering from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when improving road networks across the country demanded a new generation of substantial river crossings. The Bandon river rises in the hills to the west and runs eastward through west Cork before reaching the sea at Kinsale, and Dunmanway sits along its upper course. A crossing here would have served as a significant node in the local road system, linking the town to routes heading east. The widening to the south is a later intervention, likely carried out to accommodate heavier or wider vehicles as the bridge's original dimensions became a constraint.