It is the kind of domestic detail, a hearth in the front room, a smaller chamber behind, a practical passageway running alongside, that makes medieval life feel abruptly legible. The house is gone, of course, but its form was recovered in the mid-1990s during pre-development excavations, and what those digs found amounts to a rare cross-section of how a medieval Dublin street evolved over roughly a century.

The excavations, carried out in 1996 and 1997, worked through several distinct phases of occupation. The earliest remains were post-and-wattle structures, a construction method in which upright posts are woven with flexible rods and then typically daubed with clay or mud to form walls, dating to the twelfth century. Pottery evidence placed a cluster of six such structures, laid out within clearly defined property plots, in the late twelfth to early thirteenth century. Overlying these was the more substantial stave-built house: its walls formed by large, mortised oak base-plates laid horizontally on the ground, into which squared oak posts were set, with thin oak planks attached to the outside of the posts in a clinker-built fashion, the same overlapping technique used in boat construction. This house measured at least 9.8 metres in the excavated portion, and may have extended to 12.6 metres if it reached the Back Lane frontage. By the mid- to late thirteenth century, the area was shifting again: historical records reference stone houses on what was then called Rochelle Street, the same thoroughfare now known as Back Lane, as early as 1260.

There is nothing to see at the site today in the conventional sense; the excavation is long closed, and the street has moved on. Back Lane itself is worth a walk regardless, running as it does through one of the older parts of the city, close to the remnants of the medieval city walls. For anyone with an interest in urban archaeology, the published excavation report by Coughlan is the most direct route into the detail of what was found. The significance of the site lies less in any surviving monument and more in what it demonstrated: that medieval Dublin's street plots were already well-established and actively maintained, built upon and rebuilt in succession, long before the stone houses that history tends to remember.