No marker, no plaque, no outline in the paving. Yet for a significant stretch of the medieval period, this stretch of road was lined with the city's flesh shambles, the open stalls and lean-to structures where butchers worked and sold their meat in full view of the passing public. The word "shambles" itself derives from the Old English for a bench or table used in meat-selling, and it later came to describe the whole messy, blood-soaked trade that accompanied it. The Dublin shambles were not grand market halls but rather improvised structures, leaning against the frontages of existing houses along the street, temporary-looking additions to the urban fabric that somehow persisted for generations.

According to the historian John Gilbert, writing in his multi-volume history of Dublin between 1854 and 1859, the High Street flesh shambles were removed during the reign of James I, meaning sometime between 1603 and 1625. The physical form of the shambles has been described in later scholarship by Bradley and King as consisting of lean-to structures built against the house frontages along the street. The site appears on the Friends of Medieval Dublin Map, produced in 1978, where it is catalogued at grid reference L6, suggesting that its location was reasonably well understood by researchers even if nothing physical remained by then.

High Street today is part of the busy corridor running westward from Christchurch Cathedral toward the older core of the medieval city. A visitor walking the street would have no way of knowing where exactly the shambles stood without consulting the 1978 map or the documentary sources. There is, by the record's own admission, no visible surface trace. The site is less a destination than a provocation, a reminder that the medieval city operated at street level in ways that have been entirely absorbed or erased by subsequent centuries of building, clearing, and resurfacing. Those with an interest in Dublin's urban archaeology might find it worthwhile to cross-reference the Friends of Medieval Dublin Map with the current streetscape, if only to appreciate the scale of what has been lost to plain sight.