A small stone bridge carrying a minor road across a now-dry stream bed in County Kildare is easy to pass without a second glance. What makes it worth pausing over is its proximity, just 3.5 metres, to the ruined gatehouse of a medieval Knights Hospitaller preceptory. The bridge is a modest thing: a single masonry arch, 2.4 metres wide and 1.8 metres high, faced with undressed voussoirs, those wedge-shaped stones that distribute the load around an arch, and finished with a granite keystone on its western face. Low, walled parapets bring the total width to 7.8 metres. On one face, a plaque has weathered to illegibility, though a reading made by Fitzgerald in 1916 recorded that it bore the date 1830.

The Knights Hospitallers were a military-religious order who held this site at Kilteel during the medieval period, and the gatehouse beside the bridge would once have controlled movement across the stream. The curious detail is that the current bridge does not sit precisely where that earlier crossing would have been. The alignment appears to have shifted slightly, probably to accommodate a wider carriageway when the 1830 structure was built. That adjustment raises an intriguing question: given how close the bridge is to the ruined gatehouse, it is possible that stone from the older structure was quietly incorporated into the newer one. If so, the arch carrying a minor road through Kildare may be partly composed of material that once formed part of a medieval gateway, though the two functions are now separated by centuries and only a few metres of ground.