Pre-development testing carried out in 2002 at 52 to 56 Strand Street Great and Byrne Lane uncovered the remains of a timber riverside revetment, a structure built along a riverbank or shoreline to hold back soil and water and prevent erosion. Its presence here is a quiet reminder that the ground underfoot in Dublin's north city was once far closer to the water than the modern streetscape suggests.

The structure, documented by C. Walsh in 2004, was built from wide timber boards held in place on a series of scarf-jointed base plates. A scarf joint is a carpentry technique in which two lengths of timber are connected end-to-end at an angled or stepped cut, allowing them to function as a single continuous beam without losing structural integrity. The whole assembly appears to have been back-braced, meaning it was supported from behind to resist the lateral pressure of earth and water pushing against it. Despite the evident skill involved in its construction, the revetment is thought to have been short-lived, suggesting it may have served a temporary or highly specific purpose rather than forming part of a long-term programme of riverbank management. No further detail about its precise date or the circumstances of its abandonment has been established from the available record.

The site itself is not accessible for visitors in any conventional sense; what was found here came to light only because ground investigation preceded development, and there is nothing at street level to mark the discovery. Strand Street Great runs north of the Liffey, not far from the old quays, and walking it now offers little outward sign of its former relationship with the river. For those with an interest in Dublin's evolving waterfront, the area repays a slow look at the street names and the subtle shifts in ground level that hint at centuries of land reclamation and riverside modification. The revetment itself exists now only in the archaeological record.