Owing to their frequent occurrence in the natural environment, there has been significant interest in refining our understanding of flow over dunes and other bedforms. Recent work in this area has focused, in particular, on their shear layer characteristics and the manner by which flow structures are generated. However, field-based studies, are reliant on single-, or multi-point measurements, rather than delimiting flow structures from the velocity gradient tensor as is possible in numerical work. Here, we extract pointwise time series from a well-resolved large-eddy simulation as a means to connect these two approaches. The at-a-point analysis technique is termed the velocityintermittency quadrant method and relates the fluctuating, longitudinal velocity, u ′ 1 (t), to its fluctuating pointwise Hölder regularity, α ′ 1 (t).Despite the difference in boundary conditions, our results agree very well with previous experiments that show the importance, in the region above the dunes, of a quadrant 3 (uflow configuration. Our higher density of sampling beneath the shear layer and close to the bedforms relative to past experimental work reveals a negative correlation between u ′ 1 (t) and α