In 1994, excavations carried out at the rear of Kinlay House, on Lord Edward Street near Christchurch, uncovered the remains of nine separate structures pressed together beneath the modern city, a reminder that Dublin's medieval fabric extends well beyond its famous Viking-age reputation and into the everyday textures of the twelfth century and beyond.

The most complete structure identified during the dig was a post and wattle house, a form of construction common throughout medieval Ireland in which upright wooden posts were interwoven with flexible rods or branches and then typically daubed with clay or mud to form walls. This particular example measured roughly 6.2 metres in length and 4 metres in width, oriented on an east to west axis. Modest in scale, it would have been a working domestic space rather than anything grand. The finds recovered alongside the structural remains add texture to that picture: bronze pins, likely used for fastening clothing, fragments of bone combs suggesting everyday grooming, and pottery sherds dated to the twelfth century. Taken together, these objects point to a densely occupied urban plot at a period when the city was consolidating and expanding within its walls. The excavation was published by Murtagh in 1995.

Kinlay House still operates as a hostel today, and there is nothing on the surface to mark what lies beneath. The site falls within the boundaries of the medieval city, close to Christchurch Cathedral, which means it sits within an archaeologically sensitive zone where even routine building work can intersect with buried history. There is no public access to the excavated remains themselves, and no permanent display on site. The principal value for the curious visitor is contextual: standing at street level here, it is worth knowing that the ground below once supported a row of tightly packed wattle-walled homes, their inhabitants pinning their cloaks and combing their hair in a Dublin that would be almost unrecognisable today.