It is a busy commercial thoroughfare, lined with shopfronts and traffic, running west from the old medieval core of the city. Yet beneath the foundations of what stands at numbers 10 to 12, the ground holds traces of an earlier domestic life, modest and fragmentary, but genuinely old.

In 1994, excavations at 10-12 Thomas Street uncovered a series of gullies and stakeholes, the kind of features that archaeologists associate with light timber structures or boundary arrangements at the edges of habitation. On their own they might mean little, but they were found alongside medieval pottery, a combination that points to some form of organised human activity at the site during the medieval period. The findings were recorded by Hurley in 1995. Stakeholes are exactly what the name suggests, small voids left in the ground where upright timber stakes were once driven, and gullies in this context are shallow drainage or structural channels rather than anything more dramatic. Together they suggest not a grand building but the kind of ordinary, working domestic or craft space that made up much of medieval Dublin beyond the city walls.

Thomas Street sat just outside the walled medieval town, in an area that developed its own character as Dublin expanded, eventually becoming part of the Liberties, a district with a long history of trade and industry. The evidence from this site fits into a broader pattern of suburban medieval settlement that archaeologists have been piecing together across the south city for decades. There is nothing to see above ground today, and the site is on a functioning street with no public access to what lies beneath. The value here is less in visiting than in knowing: that the pavement underfoot on one of Dublin's most ordinary-looking streets covers ground that was shaped, drained, and staked out by people living and working there centuries before the current buildings arrived.