When excavations were carried out in 1993 ahead of the second phase of construction of the Civic Offices complex, archaeologists uncovered two substantial masonry structures buried in the ground along the Winetavern Street and Wood Quay corridor, in an area already famous for its layers of Viking and medieval remains.

The more substantial of the two structures was a large rectangular building, probably fronting onto Winetavern Street, with external dimensions of approximately ten metres by at least seventeen metres and walls around 1.6 metres thick. Walls of that thickness suggest a building of some civic or commercial weight, though nothing in the record pins down its precise function. Parallel to it lay a second, less massively built structure, known only from a single surviving wall. Associated with it were habitation layers and an area of rough stone paving that may have served as a floor surface or a form of hearth, given that several layers of ash and burnt material were found alongside it. As Andrew Halpin noted in his 1994 report on the excavations, both structures postdate the various episodes of land reclamation that had extended the medieval city out over the River Liffey's edge, but how much later they were constructed cannot be definitively established.

The Wood Quay area is accessible as public space around the Civic Offices on Winetavern Street, though there is nothing to see of the buried structures themselves above ground. The site sits close to Christ Church Cathedral, and the broader Wood Quay amphitheatre, a sunken open space beside the offices, gives some sense of the depth of the archaeological deposits below. Anyone with an interest in urban archaeology might find it worth pausing here simply to consider what the ground conceals, two stone buildings of uncertain date and unknown purpose, still waiting for a firmer account of when they stood and what they were for.