A chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin once stood on a bridge spanning this stretch of the Nore, and for several decades in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries it was significant enough to appear repeatedly in royal records, administered by named guardians and granted by kings.

The bridge was already known as St Benet's or Benedict's Bridge by 1384, when the Patent Rolls of Richard II record a parson, one John Horley, attached to what is described as a free chapel, a term for a chapel exempt from the jurisdiction of the local parish and answerable directly to its patron or the Crown. By 1393, the guardianship had passed to a clerk named John de Miditoun, who that January was granted permission to absent himself in England for five years while continuing to draw the chapel's income. Later the same year, he successfully petitioned for the construction of a stone tower on the bridge adjoining the chapel, on the grounds that the crossing had long been exploited by what the petition calls "Irish enemies" and "English malefactors" passing back and forth to cause harm to the King's subjects in the area. The tower was evidently already partly built by the time of the petition, begun by Miditoun and his predecessor. In November 1419, Henry V granted the chapel, described as vacant and in the King's gift, to a chaplain named John Lydington. After that date, the historical record goes silent on the subject.

By 1743, a traveller passing through noted the present stone bridge and remarked on the ruins of an older one visible a few yards downstream, describing it as having had "a small castle at ye end of it to defend the passage." That ruined structure, now long gone, was almost certainly the medieval bridge where the chapel and its tower once stood. The present crossing replaced it at some point before that mid-eighteenth-century account, leaving the original site submerged or eroded away in the river to the south.