The structure itself is a single-arched span of six metres, with the arch rising about 1.4 metres above the stream bed. The voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form the arch, are undressed rather than finely cut, and the arch appears to have been repointed at some point. The parapet incorporates some cut limestone, giving the bridge a quietly composite character. Nothing about the fabric of the bridge points to medieval construction, yet the place it occupies has been known and named for centuries.

The bridge appears in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century compilation of local historical and topographical knowledge gathered by scholars accompanying the first Irish Ordnance Survey, as the Bridge of Lochaid. That citation, recorded in O'Flanagan's 1928 edition of the letters, connects the crossing to a placename that appears in the Annals of the Four Masters under the year 1564. The Annals of the Four Masters is a seventeenth-century chronicle of Irish history compiled by Franciscan scholars drawing on earlier Gaelic sources, and the appearance of this particular placename within it suggests the crossing, or at least the ground it occupies, was already well established in the mid-sixteenth century. The current structure may be a later replacement, but the name Lochaid, which survives in the anglicised form Lughid, has remained attached to this spot across several centuries of change.