A 1682 account records a wooden bridge at this crossing, noted as having been "built lately by Robert Chawpen [Choppin] Esqr.", a name that suggests a local landowner of some consequence in Longford during the Restoration period.

Choppin was apparently no stranger to bridge-building in the midlands. He is also linked to the construction of a bridge at Abbeyshrule, a few miles to the south-west along the same river system, indicating that he may have played an unusually active role in the infrastructure of the region at a time when reliable river crossings were both scarce and strategically valuable. The wooden structure he built at Newcastle left nothing behind; no timbers, no abutments, no documentary detail beyond that one passing reference. The present bridge, a solid four-arched road crossing dating from around 1775, was almost certainly built on the same site, making the current structure a kind of quiet replacement for something that has otherwise been entirely erased. That gap between the 1682 wooden bridge and the 1775 stone one, nearly a century of crossings over the Inny, is simply unrecorded.