Several sections have been deliberately broken, the upper courses tumbled just below the waterline by fishermen during the twentieth century seeking access to calmer stretches of river. The result is a structure that reads as both engineered object and improvised patchwork, its gaps as historically telling as the stonework that survives.

The weir sits immediately south of the Suir, in an area that was formerly part of Co. Waterford before boundary adjustments brought it within Tipperary. Its origins are most plausibly tied to the Suirville mill complex to its east, with construction likely dating to the late eighteenth century. A 1942 account by Lyons proposed a rather more romantic history, suggesting the structure began as a Franciscan salmon weir before being extended westward by the Dudley family, who completed a contiguous corn-mill in 1782. The claim is intriguing but difficult to substantiate. The weir itself is built of limestone walling with rubble infill, roughly one to one and a quarter metres wide at the top, and the eastern end once featured an exit sluice topped with a brick arch, a small detail that speaks to the care originally invested in managing the river's flow. A regulating weir of this kind was designed primarily to raise or control water levels, directing current toward a mill race to power the grinding machinery downstream, rather than to trap fish directly.