It is an unusual thing to ask of a passing stranger, and it gives this otherwise workaday crossing an unexpectedly personal quality. The bridge stretches 46 metres across the river, just south of Holycross Abbey, and what looks at first like a single coherent structure is in fact several centuries of construction and repair laid on top of one another.

The oldest part, 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 Co. Limerick, which was built around 1410, and to Abingdon Bridge in England, completed in 1416. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form the curve of an arch, are roughly cut on this older section, and the arches themselves are segmental-pointed in profile. On the downstream side the arches shift to a semicircular shape with more carefully dressed limestone voussoirs with a chamfered edge, suggesting a later extension, possibly in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Tucked underneath three arches on the downstream side, slightly off-centre, an even earlier flat arch survives, its thin voussoirs set on edge, as though the bridge has been quietly accumulating layers beneath its own surface. In 1626 the whole structure was rebuilt after it had collapsed, the work overseen by James Butler, Baron of Dunboyne, and his wife Margaret O'Brien. A gate or arch was added at the western end at that time; Gabriel Beranger sketched it in the late eighteenth century, but it no longer stands.

At the north-western end of the bridge, two armorial plaques are set into the wall, and beneath them a limestone slab carries the Latin dedication in raised Roman script. The inscription addresses itself directly to whoever happens to be crossing: it names Nicholas Cowley as the original constructor, records the Butlers' rebuilding and their armorial decoration, gives the year 1626, and then, in a register that shifts abruptly from civic record to something close to supplication, asks the traveller to pause and pray. The plaque appears to be in its original position; two words spill from the slab onto an adjacent wall stone, suggesting it was carved in place rather than inserted later. It is a small detail, but it tells you that someone in 1626 wanted the prayer to be said, and said here, by real people on their way across the Suir.