At Gracedieu in County Dublin, however, the mortar pressed against the inner curve of a single-span stone bridge still bears the imprints of the wattle, the woven rods used as temporary shuttering to support the arch during construction. That faint texture, preserved for centuries in lime, is one of the more quietly remarkable details you are unlikely to see, because the bridge is now completely overgrown and fenced off from casual approach.

The bridge sits at the south-west corner of a field immediately south of a motte field and south-west of the Gracedieu nunnery, the remains of which survive nearby. It carries a span of approximately five metres, built from a combination of random rubble and well-squared limestone blocks, a mix that reflects the practical and careful work of medieval builders. Tradition holds that it formed part of what was known as the nun's road, a route connecting the nunnery to the town of Swords to the north. The bridge shares its construction style with another bridge a short distance to the east, and that eastern structure was dated on stylistic grounds to the fourteenth century by Simington and O'Keefe in 1991, suggesting this one belongs to roughly the same period.

Accessing the site requires some patience. The bridge lies on private agricultural land, hemmed in by field boundaries and dense vegetation that has built up over years of neglect. The motte field and nunnery ruins in the surrounding area provide a broader context for anyone interested in the medieval landscape of this part of north County Dublin, and those associated monuments are perhaps the more practical starting point for a visit. Anyone hoping to locate the bridge itself should be aware that it is not visible from a road and that the overgrowth makes the arch difficult to distinguish even at close range. The wattle-marked mortar, that small fingerprint of a fourteenth-century workforce, remains there beneath the ivy and bramble, waiting for a clearance that has not yet come.