In the shallow east-west valley at Caherlough in County Clare, Kells Bridge crosses what was once a watercourse but is now just a depression in the land, leaving the structure to do nothing hydraulically useful while remaining architecturally intact. Three arches carry the bridge, with cut stone voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch in place, visible at both ends. The bridge was evidently enlarged at some point, with additional work carried out to the west side, where breakwaters still project from the piers. The eastern parapet and its voussoirs are later insertions rather than original fabric, and the underside of the arches has been repointed at some stage, suggesting the structure has had more than one period of maintenance or modification.

What makes the site stranger still is the older crossing it replaced. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1913, identified this as the location of an ancient ford known as Corravickburrin, from the Irish Cora mhic Dhaboirean. A ford in this context would have been a shallow, managed crossing point in a river or stream, often significant enough to acquire a proper name and appear in local tradition. Westropp's identification was taken seriously enough that the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the spot in Gothic lettering as "Corravicburrin (Site of)", that typographic convention being the cartographers' way of signalling a place of historical or antiquarian note. The stream itself is long gone, but the name recorded on that map preserves the memory of a crossing point that clearly mattered to people navigating this part of Clare long before the bridge was ever built.