The excavation at 16–17 Cook Street turned up both, sitting within the same medieval deposits, and the combination raises more questions than it answers. The wall, the boat, the scattered finds: none of it fits neatly into a single story, which is part of what makes the site quietly interesting.

When archaeologists examined the site, reported by Meenan in 1994, they found a stone wall approximately one metre wide and surviving to a depth of around 1.8 metres. The stones had not been mortared and their faces were not well finished, which suggested the wall was never free-standing but was instead built into a cut trench, the stones packed down and pressed outward against the trench edges. A possible floor level was identified nearby. There was no direct dating evidence, but the complete absence of late medieval or post-medieval finds from any layer below the uppermost course of masonry pointed toward a medieval date. One small detail confirmed this in its own way: a sherd of medieval roof tile had been used to fill a gap between two courses of stone near the base, a practical solution that incidentally left a chronological clue. The building's purpose remained uncertain, though its position suggested it may have been a house fronting directly onto Cook Street. Among the finds were two gilt pins, pottery both locally made and imported, leather, wooden objects, and a nearly complete wooden blade around 45 centimetres long, flattened at one end. A single ship's timber lay flat within the deposits. Most striking was the partial remains of a boat, roughly four metres long and 0.7 metres wide, with planks fitted into the keel along one side.

Cook Street runs through the Liberties area of Dublin's south city, close to the old city walls, and today gives little outward sign of what lies beneath it. The excavated remains are not on public display, and the site itself has long since been built over. What survives is the record: a medieval street-front building that may have sheltered people who, at some point, also had a use for boats small enough to be stored or repaired in very close quarters to their home.