At 68/69 O'Connell Street, a stretch of medieval masonry was uncovered during limited archaeological excavations, sitting quietly beneath and in direct alignment with a wall that is still standing above ground. That alignment is the curious detail: whatever was built centuries ago appears to have quietly shaped, or at least anticipated, what came later.

The excavation, carried out under licence in 2000, exposed a length of wall constructed from flat stone blocks averaging roughly 0.4 metres long and 0.1 metres thick. Whether it formed part of a medieval building or served as a boundary wall dividing one plot from another is not definitively known. The location is described as burgagery lands, a term worth pausing on: burgage plots were long, narrow strips of land allocated to burgesses, the tradespeople and freemen of medieval towns, who held them in exchange for a fixed annual rent. They were the basic unit of urban life in the medieval Irish town, and the boundaries between them were often maintained, reused, and built over for generations. The wall found here may reflect exactly that kind of continuity, a property line or structure from the medieval period that later builders unconsciously honoured simply by following the lie of the land.