The bridge at Graiguenoe carries the River Suir beneath eight segmental-pointed arches, the kind of slightly pointed arch form common to late medieval Irish bridgework, and sits immediately south of Holycross Abbey. What makes it worth pausing over is not just its age but the way it quietly holds several centuries of construction within a single structure, and the frankness of that Latin inscription at its northwest end.

The oldest part of the bridge, the upstream section, has been dated to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, a dating based on its close resemblance to Adare Bridge in County Limerick, which was built around 1410, and to Abingdon Bridge in England, completed in 1416. The voussoirs on this section, the wedge-shaped stones that form the arches, are roughly cut, and low pointed breakwaters project upstream to deflect the current. On the downstream face, the arches are semicircular rather than pointed and are built from well-cut limestone with a chamfered edge, suggesting a later extension, probably sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Beneath three of those downstream arches, an even earlier structure is still faintly visible: a flattened, almost depressed arch of thin, roughly cut voussoirs set on edge, the ghost of a yet older crossing folded into the underside of the bridge. In 1626, James Butler, Baron of Dunboyne, undertook a substantial rebuilding of the collapsed structure with his wife, Lady Margaret O'Brien. A gate or arch was added at the western end during this work; Gabriel Beranger sketched it in the late eighteenth century, but it no longer stands. Two armorial plaques were also set into the wall, and below them the limestone inscription, carved in raised Roman script, which names a certain Nicholas Cowley as the original builder before recording the Butlers' restoration and ending with its memorable appeal to any traveller who happens to read it: say a short prayer, it asks, that the two who rebuilt it may escape the pit of hell.

The plaque appears to be in its original position, since two words of the inscription overflow onto an adjacent wall stone rather than fitting neatly within the plaque's own surface. It is a small detail, but it suggests the text was composed for exactly this spot and has not moved since 1626.