Beneath what is now a busy intersection in Waterford city, layers of domestic life accumulated for centuries before anyone thought to look. When excavations were carried out at Exchange Street and High Street in 1984 and 1985, the ground gave up a remarkably legible sequence of occupation: a 17th-century laneway, a courtyard complete with a well, ovens, and a drainage system. These were not the remains of a grand public building or a church, but the ordinary infrastructure of people going about their daily lives, cooking, disposing of water, moving between yards and streets.

The archaeologist S. Stevens led the work, and beneath those post-medieval features lay something older still. Material dating from the 12th to the 14th centuries emerged in the form of pits, trackways, and hearths, the kind of evidence that speaks to long-term, incremental settlement rather than any single dramatic event. Waterford was already a significant Norse and then Anglo-Norman town by this period, and urban excavations of this kind frequently reveal how densely inhabited the medieval street plan actually was. Pits in an urban medieval context typically served as rubbish deposits or storage, and the trackways suggest organised movement through the area across several generations. Stevens published his findings in the journal Decies, the local history periodical for the Waterford region, and the site was also noted in a wider survey of medieval archaeology across Britain and Ireland for the year 1984.