The crossing itself has long since been superseded, but the place retains an echo of its older function in the name recorded on the second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1901: Ballyhooney Bridge, sitting over what was likely the same river at the same approximate point.

The ford appears in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a systematic record of land ownership and boundaries compiled in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, when the new administration needed to know exactly what it had taken and from whom. The entry locates the crossing on the river Biallahowna and notes that it was bounded to the south by the ploughland of Killeagh, in the parish of Finogh. Ploughlands were units of land measurement used in Irish administrative records of the period, and their boundaries often followed natural features like rivers and fords, which made such crossings important fixed points in the landscape. The ford at Clooninihy was, in that sense, not merely a convenient place to cross water but a legal and geographical marker, the kind of detail that mattered to surveyors drawing up a record of who held what.