The 1728 quay recorded by historian John W. de Courcy in his exhaustive study of the river is one such moment, a specific act of civil engineering that contributed to the gradual taming and ordering of a tidal estuary that had, for centuries, resisted easy use.

De Courcy's 1996 work on the Liffey remains one of the most detailed accounts of how Dublin's river was progressively shaped by human intervention. The construction noted at pages 405 to 406 places this quay firmly in the early eighteenth century, a period of considerable activity along the river when the city was expanding southward and the need for reliable wharfage and flood management was becoming increasingly pressing. Quay construction at this time typically involved the laying of stone revetments along the riverbank, pushing the water's edge outward and creating usable ground from what had previously been mudflat or marshy foreshore. The work was part of a broader civic effort to give Dublin a coherent and functional waterfront rather than the irregular and often impassable margins that had characterised it in earlier periods.

The quay itself sits within what is now the dense urban fabric of Dublin's south city, where the original eighteenth-century stonework, if any survives, would be largely obscured beneath later surfaces, road schemes, and riverside developments. Visitors with an interest in the Liffey's evolution might find de Courcy's volume, widely available in Irish libraries, a useful companion for tracing exactly where along the south quays this particular stretch falls. The riverside footpaths between Grattan Bridge and O'Donovan Rossa Bridge offer some of the better ground-level views of the quay walls, where the layering of different periods of construction occasionally becomes visible in the stonework.