When developers moved to break ground at 36 to 39 James's Street, archaeologists found something that rarely survives the centuries of urban accumulation that Dublin heaps upon its own past: the physical boundaries of fields that once organised this land long before the city swallowed it whole.

Pre-development excavations at the site uncovered two intersecting ditches, the kind used in medieval field systems to demarcate land boundaries and manage drainage. One ran north to south, cut in a U-shaped profile and extending some fourteen metres in length; the other ran east to west, also U-shaped in profile, half a metre deep and running to twenty metres. Together they formed the kind of right-angled intersection that would have been unremarkable to anyone working this ground in the thirteenth century, but which now represents a rare legible trace of pre-urban land use in this part of the city. Pottery recovered from both ditches placed their use somewhere between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, a span that encompasses the height of Anglo-Norman settlement in the Dublin area and the gradual absorption of peripheral agricultural land into the expanding town. The findings were recorded by A. Cryerhall and published in Excavations 2003.

There is nothing to see above ground today, and James's Street is not a place that invites slow walking. But knowing that these ditches once lay here, underneath the traffic and the footfall, does change how the street reads. The area sits close to the old medieval core of the city, and the field system would have supplied or bordered the urban settlement that was already establishing itself nearby. For anyone interested in the archaeology of everyday life rather than grand monuments, the unglamorous evidence of field boundaries and their associated pottery sherds carries its own particular weight.