What emerges through the growth, where the masonry can be made out at all, is a structure of semi-coursed sandstone ashlar, its single semicircular arch still spanning the northward-flowing water, its parapets carrying vertical stone coping and their bases projecting slightly beyond the body of the bridge in a detail known as oversailing. Unremarkable at a glance, perhaps, but look at the stones themselves and something more specific reveals itself: drill holes, the signatures of explosive quarrying, worked into the fabric of the bridge.

Those drill holes place this structure firmly in the 1840s, a decade when blasting powder was becoming common enough in Irish road-building to leave its mark on the raw material. The bridge at Feorus appears to have been constructed as part of a new alignment of the Kenmare to Castletownbere road, a route of real practical consequence in this part of south Kerry, connecting the market town of Kenmare with the Beara Peninsula. When the road was re-routed, the existing crossing was superseded, and a replacement was built here, roughly seven metres wide and oriented east to west. The older bridge it replaced still exists approximately a hundred metres to the south, making this small stretch of overgrown riverbank something of an accidental record of successive infrastructure decisions across the same crossing point.