The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the location simply as "Piers of Br.", a quiet annotation beside the old Infant School on the south bank, indicating that by then only the remnants of an abutment and two piers remained. This is not the bridge that carries traffic today, nor the medieval one that preceded it, but a middle bridge, built and lost within the span of a few decades, whose story runs through turnpike legislation, a landed family with Jacobite connections, and a couplet by Jonathan Swift.

The context begins with the Dublin to Kinnegad Turnpike Act of 1731, which noted that the causeway of St Katherine's between Lucan and Leixlip was being regularly flooded by the Liffey, that several people had lost their lives there, and that a new bridge at a more convenient point would prevent further deaths. The act empowered trustees to build a bridge of stone and lime, and among the hundred or more trustees named were two men called Agmondisham Vesey, father and son, who had come into the Lucan estate after the elder Vesey married a niece of Patrick Sarsfield in the 1720s. Swift, himself a trustee of a related turnpike act and well acquainted with the financing arrangements of such schemes, probably composed his wry couplet sometime in the 1730s: "Agmondisham Vesey out of great bounty / Built the bridge at the expense of the county." A later act of 1771 to 1772 confirms that a new bridge had indeed been built at county expense, and that Vesey agreed to route the new road through his estate to shorten the turnpike, in exchange for the right to close off the old road west of the small river called the Griffeen. The bridge was evidently swept away in the floods of either 1784 or 1786, and a replacement was not built until 1814, 180 metres upstream.

The site sits between the present Lucan Bridge to the east and the location of the medieval bridge further west, making it one point in a sequence of three crossings that once served this stretch of the Liffey. The 1844 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which records the abutment and pier remnants, is the most useful documentary guide to understanding the layout, and comparing it with the modern landscape gives a sense of how much the riverbank has changed. The 1837 map annotation near the former Infant School on the south bank is the clearest surviving marker of where this lost bridge once stood.