The whole arrangement, a fortified port enclosed by pier-like walls terminating in towers, has long since vanished from the streetscape, but its outline survives in old maps and in a catastrophic footnote to the city's history that is easy to overlook entirely.

The port's southern boundary was a wall running nearly 400 feet along the quay, beginning at a seemingly three-sided tower at the foot of what a French cartographic survey labelled the "Rue du Quay," the modern Bridge Street. According to historians Fitzgerald and McGregor, around 1500 a wall and vault were constructed on the south side of the quay, with the vault serving as a covered passage leading out to the six-gun battery near the flood-gate at the pierhead. That French map, referenced by Lenihan in 1866, recorded the entrance steps in considerable detail. The wall was repaired in 1640 to 1641 during the mayoralty of William Comyn, and a commemorative inscription marking the work was recorded in the first edition of Ferrar's History of Limerick, published in 1767. Then, in 1693, the tower collapsed. The falling masonry struck the 250 barrels of gunpowder stored within, detonating them with devastating effect: people were killed, houses were wrecked, windows were shattered across the city, and roofs were stripped bare. The battery at the pierhead, architectural historian Harold Leask noted in 1941, appears to have been built as a successor to that tower.

There is nothing physically to see at this site today in the conventional sense; the battery, the vault, the steps, and the wall are all gone, absorbed into the fabric of a city that has been rebuilt many times over. What makes a visit worthwhile is the layering of the place. Standing at Bridge Street near the quayside, it is worth considering that the ground underfoot once concealed a vaulted passage leading to an armed pierhead, and that somewhere close by, in 1693, a tower fell and a powder magazine went up. The record of the site is held under the National Monuments Service reference LI005-017073-, and the French map described by Lenihan remains the most detailed surviving visual evidence of what the port once looked like.