On an Ordnance Survey town plan of 1841 it appears as St. Connell's Abbey Bridge; an estate map drawn just a year later calls it simply New Bridge; and by 1848 a drainage and navigation survey of the Fergus district had settled on Ennis Bridge. Three names, three maps, roughly seven years. Whatever the cartographers made of it, the crossing itself was clearly still finding its identity.

The bridge it replaced had a shorter lifespan than those shifting names might suggest. Moland's map of Ennis, drawn in 1703, shows a bridge on this site, and the historian Ó Dálaigh has argued that it must have been built sometime between the 1680s and that date, since neither Brigdall nor Dineley, writing accounts of the area in the 1680s, make any mention of it. Once built, it made a considerable difference to how Ennis functioned. It opened the old Franciscan friary precinct to passing traffic, linked the town with the townland of Lifford on the northern bank of the Fergus, and drew travellers away from an older river crossing at Clonroad, redirecting the flow of traffic coming in from Galway and north Clare. That earlier bridge was demolished in 1835, and the present structure followed in its place. The accumulation of names after 1841 may simply reflect the novelty of the replacement, different authorities and landowners each applying their own preferred designation to something that had not yet settled into common usage.