That a pair of working mills should occupy opposite banks of the same narrow urban river is unusual enough, but what makes the site quietly remarkable is how much of their infrastructure has survived, invisibly, beneath the streets and waterways of the modern city. The weir that fed them, the grain deposits beside them, and fragments of the town wall that framed them were all still down there, waiting to be disturbed by drainage contractors.

The evidence for these mills emerged during excavations carried out from the late 1990s onwards by Ed O'Donovan on behalf of Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd, under licence 98E0581, as part of the Limerick Main Drainage Scheme. Dredging and pipe-laying along the Abbey River and George's Quay brought up far more than silt. The foundations of an early weir were identified in the riverbed, a structure thought to pre-date both Charlotte's Quay and Bank Place, and interpreted as a head-race, the channel that directed water with enough force to drive a mill wheel, serving one mill under what is now Bank Place and the other at the junction of Creagh Lane and George's Quay. The site also yielded organic deposits of sixteenth-century date containing the grain weevil Sitophilus granarius, a species entirely dependent on human activity for its spread and closely associated with stored grain. Entomologist Eileen Reilly noted that these deposits likely relate to grain storage around Nicholas Arthur's Mill, which appears on Hardiman's map of around 1590. Nearby, workers uncovered sections of the medieval town wall at George's Quay, including what may have been a projecting bastion; similar features can be seen on the Pacata Hibernia map and Speed's map of the city.

There is nothing to see above ground in the conventional sense. The mills themselves are long gone, and the weir foundations and wall sections are buried once more beneath quay surfaces and river sediment. The interest here is in reading the present streetscape against the historic maps, particularly Hardiman's map of circa 1590 and Speed's slightly later survey, both of which show the mills and projecting wall structures in some detail. The junction of Creagh Lane and George's Quay is worth a pause, with the Abbey River visible nearby, if only to consider that somewhere beneath the pavement the weir foundations remain, and that the insect remains of a sixteenth-century grain store were recovered within a few metres of an ordinary modern street.