That peculiarity is the first thing to understand about the clapper bridge at Waterhouse in north Cork. A clapper bridge is one of the oldest and simplest bridge forms: upright stone piers, usually rough-built, topped with flat slabs laid across them to form a walking surface. The Waterhouse example once stretched roughly thirty-five metres across the Awbeg River, but at some point in the early twentieth century the river was dredged and narrowed to around twenty metres, and the south-eastern section of the bridge was removed. What remains, seven limestone piers topped with long flat slabs, now sits largely on dry land at the north-western bank, a bridge that has quietly outlasted the water it was built to cross.

The bridge does not appear on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though the Awbeg is shown there at its original width, running close along the edge of Water House. Its pre-twentieth-century form can be traced through a photograph published by Jones in 1906 and a plan drawn up by O'Keeffe and Simington in 1991. The seven surviving piers vary in height between 0.7 and 1 metre, and the span between them increases from north-west to south-east. The limestone slabs laid across them range from just over a metre to two and a half metres in length, and three of the wider slabs have a thin strip of metal set into their centre, a detail whose original purpose is not recorded. According to local tradition documented by Grove White in the early twentieth century, the bridge was used by the monks of Ballybeg Abbey, an Augustinian house located about 450 metres to the south-east, to reach a grist mill somewhere in the Waterhouse townland. A feature known as Monk's Pond, situated behind Springfield House on the south-eastern bank of the river, may also be connected to this monastic activity, suggesting that the monks moved through this stretch of the Awbeg with some regularity, crossing between their abbey and the working buildings that supported it.