Built to a width of just over four metres, it spans the river on five semicircular arches, and the corbels still visible on its piers offer a quiet clue to how it was put together. Corbels are small projecting brackets of stone; here they served as temporary supports for the wooden centring, the curved framework used to hold the arch stones in place while the mortar cured. Once the arch was self-supporting, the centring came down and the corbels were simply left where they were, embedded in the piers as incidental evidence of an old building method.

The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form each arch, are described as roughly shaped, suggesting this was a functional rather than a polished piece of engineering. On the upstream face, low pointed breakwaters project from the piers, a standard precaution on river bridges to divide the current and reduce the force of water, and of any debris carried by it, against the stonework. The bridge has been repaired at some point, though the details of when or how extensively are not recorded. What survives is a structure that seems to have been built with care for practicality, if not for ornament, carrying a road over a County Cork river and doing so, by the look of it, for a considerable time.