The small stream it crosses does double duty as a boundary line, marking the edge between the townlands of An Leathchartúr (also rendered as Cartron) and Baile na hAbhann Theas, known in English as Ballynahown South. Townland boundaries in Ireland frequently follow natural features, rivers and streams especially, and there is something pleasingly neat about a bridge that sits precisely at the point where one named place ends and another begins.

What gives the bridge its particular interest is its position within a now largely vanished road network. According to cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, who documented the area in 1986, the bridge lies on the line of an old roadway that once ran northward from a pier roughly 550 metres to the south, continuing up to the southern tip of Loch na Tulaí, known in English as Tully Lough. That route, linking a coastal landing point to an inland lake, traces the kind of practical, pre-modern movement corridor that tended to follow the most direct negotiable line across a landscape, connecting the sea to freshwater, and the work of fishing or trade to the territories beyond. The bridge, still largely intact, is one of the few remaining physical markers of that corridor.