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Surprisingly, Wikipedia has a bunch photos of fords shown on a variety of rivers - and not a one is "rocky" in the sense of visible rocks.

They tend to be about knee deep, shallow, wide, moderate speed water; fast enough to scour the bottom, slow enough to not generate white water.

If anything, the crumbled bridge likely is not the actual ford.

As described, during low water, The Old Ford is walkable... axle depth (about 1.5 to 2 feet - 0.5 to 0.7m) or lower. A pony gets a wet belly, a horse doesn't, and the wagon's bed stays dry. During high water, it's probably both deeper (at least chest deep for a human) and probably too fast to wade, and probably thrice the width, too.

Remember, rivers cut a low-flow channel, and a high flow channel - and shallowly slope from the straighter high flow channel to the more meandering low-flow one (which may in fact be not one, but several braided channels, even).

Heilemann wrote:I always imagined The Old Ford as being a rocky, shallow, wide section of river, with ruins of an ancient bridge.

I don't picture the remains of a bridge at the Old Ford; I doubt that there was ever meant to have been one. The banks might have been pebbly, but I am imagining a river bottom of slate, or perhaps some harder bedrock.

Otaku-sempai wrote:

Heilemann wrote:I always imagined The Old Ford as being a rocky, shallow, wide section of river, with ruins of an ancient bridge.

I don't picture the remains of a bridge at the Old Ford; I doubt that there was ever meant to have been one. The banks might have been pebbly, but I am imagining a river bottom of slate, or perhaps some harder bedrock.

There was a bridge there, once. The remains of which might actually form part of the ford.
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Old_Ford

A considerable bridge in fact, it was expanded, IIRC, near the end of the second age, when the armies marched on Angband.