The precise spot has been lost, but the records of its existence and upkeep survive, offering a small, specific window into how the city managed its relationship with the river long before the quays were formalised into the streetscape we recognise today.

The earliest reference comes from Clarke (2002), who notes the slipway's presence at the west end of the quay adjacent to Bridge Gate in 1503. A slipway in this context would have been a gently inclined surface running down to the water's edge, used to launch or land small vessels and to haul goods or boats clear of the tide. Bridge Gate was one of the medieval city's river-level entry points, and its immediate surroundings would have been among the busiest and most contested stretches of the urban waterfront. The slipway reappears in the documentary record three more times, each occasion connected to repair work: in 1560, 1595, and again in 1608. That pattern of maintenance across more than a century suggests it remained genuinely useful rather than merely inherited on paper, though what prompted each repair, whether flood damage, heavy use, or simple deterioration, the sources do not say. De Courcy (1996) notes that its exact location cannot now be determined.

There is nothing to see here in any conventional sense. The medieval quayside in this area has been buried under successive centuries of reclamation, rebuilding, and modern infrastructure, and no physical trace of the slipway has been identified. What makes the spot worth thinking about is precisely that absence. The western end of the old south quay, somewhere near where Bridge Gate once stood, is now ordinary urban ground, and the fact that a working slipway once sloped into the Liffey there is known only because someone recorded its repair costs. For anyone interested in the texture of medieval Dublin's working waterfront, that combination of documentary precision and physical invisibility is, in its own way, rather instructive.