Sixteen metres long and just under five metres wide, it presents three pointed arches of unequal width, crenellated parapets, and pointed niches sitting above the breakwaters between the arches. These details do not quite add up to a single coherent moment of construction, and that inconsistency is precisely what makes the structure interesting. Beneath the carriageway, archaeological testing uncovered a cobbled surface, but produced nothing that could pin the bridge to a particular century.

The technique of plank centring, where a temporary wooden framework of planks supports the arch during construction before being removed, is associated with early medieval bridge-building, and it raises the possibility that this structure dates to the 13th century, contemporary with Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian foundation visible roughly 200 metres to the north-west. The Cistercians, a monastic order known for ambitious building programmes, arrived in the area in the medieval period, and a bridge serving traffic between the abbey and the surrounding road network would have made practical sense. However, writing in 1839, Samuel Lewis recorded a different account, one followed later by Philip Herbert Hore, that the bridge was built by the Colclough family using stone taken from the abbey itself. The crenellations and niches lend some weight to the idea that whatever was originally built here was substantially reworked, perhaps during the 17th or 18th century. The bridge sits along a route that once carried travellers from Wexford town through Baldwinstown and Duncormick, crossing the inner end of Bannow Bay by a tidal ford at Barrystown called Scar, passable only at low water. The artist Gabriel Beranger described this crossing in 1780, and the road itself was documented by Taylor and Skinner in their 1783 survey of Irish roads. A western causeway, 44.5 metres long, still leads into the bridge, and on the eastern side the old road climbs a slope past a church, tracing the same line it has followed for centuries.