Look north, and you find dressed voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch in place, cut from ashlar limestone and framed by pointed cutwaters that divide the current with a neat, deliberate geometry. Look south, and the picture changes: eight arches heavily repaired, two of them apparently replaced entirely, the patchwork of later intervention far more visible than any original craftsmanship. The bridge is slightly hump-backed, spanning roughly 7.6 metres in width along a northeast-to-southwest axis, and the contrast between its two halves gives it a quiet archaeological interest that a casual crossing might not register.

The structure may well be the Blackwater Bridge named on an inscribed plaque at Kanturk Bridge, some distance away. That plaque records a bridge erected in 1757 at Gortmore, with Purcell and Bastable listed as trustees, suggesting the crossing was a civic undertaking of some formality for its time. Eighteenth-century road bridges in rural Ireland were frequently built under trustees appointed to manage local infrastructure, and the presence of named trustees implies a degree of official accountability rather than purely private patronage. If the identification is correct, the northern arches, with their more carefully finished stonework, may represent the surviving fabric of that mid-eighteenth-century build, while the southern section reflects the accumulated repairs of the centuries that followed.