The limestone blocks incorporated into their construction are too large, too roughly dressed, too substantial to have been quarried fresh for modest urban purposes. They were, in all likelihood, borrowed from something older and more significant, a common enough practice in a city that rarely wasted good stone.

In 1992, an archaeological assessment of a site in Dublin's south city uncovered a medieval layer that shed some light on what that something older might have been. Among the finds were fragments of floor tile and crested ridge tile, the kind of decorative roofing element, a raised ornamental finish running along the apex of a roof, typically associated with ecclesiastical or high-status secular buildings in medieval Ireland. The assessment, published by Halpin in 1993, concluded that these fragments pointed clearly to a medieval building or buildings of some status on or near the site. The limestone blocks embedded in the later walls seemed to confirm the same story: when the medieval structure eventually came down, its materials were absorbed into whatever came next, as happened across much of the old city during centuries of rebuilding and redevelopment.

The site itself does not announce its medieval connections to a casual passer-by. There is nothing visible above ground to mark the earlier occupation, and the archaeological layer was reached only through formal assessment work. For anyone with an interest in Dublin's buried topography, the Halpin report remains the most direct route to understanding what was found here. The south city holds a dense concentration of such layered histories, where Georgian and Victorian streetscapes overlie far earlier occupation, and where the occasional salvaged block of limestone in an old wall can carry more historical information than its builders ever intended.