It is one of several pedestrian refuges worked into the fabric of this crossing between Carrick-on-Suir and Carrickbeg, where the triangular cutwaters on the upriver face have been extended upward to offer shelter to anyone stepping aside from passing traffic. The arrangement is quietly ingenious, and it points to a structure that has been adapted and added to over a very long span of time.

The bridge's origins reach back at least as far as the mid-fourteenth century. Pontage grants, which were tolls levied specifically to fund bridge construction and repair, were recorded between 1343 and 1356, and some elements of the existing structure may survive from that period. The eight-arch span stretching 91.4 metres across the Suir has been dated by some scholars to 1447, though others place its construction in the sixteenth century, and the question has not been fully resolved. What is clear is that the bridge was already established enough to appear on the Down Survey map of 1656, one of the earliest systematic cartographic records of Irish land. The southernmost arch complicates the picture further: it was widened in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century to more than double its original span, reaching 15.2 metres against the standard 6-metre width of the other arches. An excavation in 2001 uncovered an additional arch whose date, assessed from its form, may be either fifteenth- or seventeenth-century, adding another unresolved layer to a bridge that resists any single, clean chronology.