The hump-backed crossing over the Bride River at Kilcrea has been altered at least twice and is remembered in rather contradictory ways, which gives it a quiet complexity that is easy to miss if you simply drive over it. What appears to be a modest rural bridge, just 2.9 metres wide, is actually a layered structure whose visible form only partly reflects what was originally built.

The original bridge had eight round arches, each flanked by triangular breakwaters, the pointed projections built into a bridge's piers to split the current and reduce pressure on the structure. These breakwaters were finished with semi-pyramidal cappings, a detail suggesting some care was taken in their construction. Sometime after 1865, a drainage scheme on the Bride River required the removal of the three northernmost arches, the ones that actually spanned the active channel, which were replaced by a single, wider segmental arch. The remaining five arches were blocked up rather than demolished, and the bases of their breakwaters are still visible between them. On the downstream side, one of the pointed breakwaters was extended upward to create a small refuge set into the parapet wall, a practical feature that allowed a pedestrian to step aside when a cart or animal passed on the narrow roadway. Local tradition holds that the earlier portion of the bridge dates from Cromwellian times, roughly the mid-seventeenth century, though the researchers O'Keeffe and Simington, writing in 1991, were cautious about accepting that date without firmer evidence.

The result is a bridge that reads, on close inspection, as several different structures occupying the same space. The single working arch is post-Victorian engineering; the blocked arches beside it belong to an earlier phase whose precise date remains uncertain; and the pedestrian refuge is a small social detail, a reminder that bridges in daily use had to accommodate the full, awkward traffic of rural life.