Two bronze plaques on the parapet give that impression away quickly enough: one names the architects, J.A. and G.R. Pain, and the Limerick Navigation Company as its financiers; the other records that work began in November 1830 and finished in November 1831. What neither plaque can quite convey is what lies beneath the current crossing, and beneath the river gravels around it, where the accumulated material of more than a thousand years of urban life has been sitting largely undisturbed.

The ford at this point across the Abbey River is thought to have been in use since at least the Viking period. The Urban Survey of Limerick, drawing on a reference to a bridge destroyed by Domhnall Mór Ua Briain in 1176, places an early crossing somewhere in this vicinity, probably linking King's Island, where the Anglo-Norman Englishtown developed, with the Irishtown on the southern mainland. When the Anglo-Normans arrived in 1175, however, the bridge had not yet been built; Giraldus Cambrensis records that the attackers found a ford and that one of them hurled himself into the swiftly flowing river to cross it. Excavations carried out in 1998 under licence number 98E0581, ahead of the Limerick Main Drainage Scheme, uncovered two medieval bridge piers beneath the junction of Broad Street and Charlotte Quay. Oak timbers associated with one of those piers were submitted for dendrochronological dating, a technique that uses tree-ring sequences to establish when timber was felled, and the results pointed to construction in the early thirteenth century. Fifty trenches were also excavated in the riverbed itself, and the gravels proved exceptionally productive. Among the finds were a possible Iron Age horse bit, an Early Christian bronze zoomorphic object, Viking Age stick-pins, and a coin minted in London around 1035 for King Cnut. Fifty medieval coins spanning 1200 to 1540 were recovered, alongside Irish, Scottish, French, and English examples, and a seal dating to around 1600 bearing the Lymerick Port coat of arms. Objects from the Williamite siege of the city in the 1690s, including musket balls, gun flints, iron bayonets, fragments of mortar bombs, and Jacobite gun money, were also retrieved from the riverbed.

The bridge sits between Mary Street to the north and Broad Street to the south, and is straightforward to reach on foot from Limerick city centre. The two plaques on the parapet are worth reading carefully; one notes that the bridge was erected under an Act of George IV, with Thomas Spring Rice, then MP for Limerick, named as a driving figure. The bridge itself is not large, and the hump of its single arch is noticeable enough to slow cyclists. What rewards attention is the setting rather than the structure: the Abbey River here is narrow and fast, and the knowledge that two thirteenth-century bridge piers survive just a few metres below the road surface, alongside river gravels that yielded a Viking coin and siege-era grenades, gives an otherwise ordinary crossing an unusually deep archaeological shadow.