The layer, a light brown, fine, sandy clay with occasional flecks of charcoal, was encountered during construction groundworks but never fully investigated. Only the uppermost 50 millimetres were exposed, within a single metre-long foundation trench, and no datable material was recovered from it. Whether it represents the remnants of medieval occupation, an earlier hearth, or something more mundane, no one can say with certainty.

The site sits within what is formally recognised as the zone of archaeological potential for Wicklow town, an area where the ground beneath ordinary streets and buildings is considered likely to hold traces of earlier settlement. That designation is not without basis: excavations carried out in 1997 by James Eogan in an adjoining property had already uncovered a series of medieval pits and two shallow ditches, suggesting that activity of some age had taken place in this immediate neighbourhood. When test-trenching by Una Cosgrave subsequently turned up the same clay deposit in two separate trenches, Dúchas The Heritage Service, the state body then responsible for heritage protection, recommended that all further ground disturbance be archaeologically monitored. That monitoring, carried out across two days, revealed layers of modern rubble and gravel sitting above earlier rubble containing red brick, with the clay layer appearing only in the north-eastern corner. Because the foundation trenches went no deeper than approximately 0.65 metres in that area, the deposit was barely touched, and the development was designed so as not to disturb it further.

What remains is a small parcel of unread ground in the middle of a busy county town, its contents still sealed. The charcoal flecking in the clay hints at human activity, fire perhaps, or the slow accumulation of domestic debris over generations, but the evidence stops there. Archaeology is often described as the recovery of the past, yet some of its most telling moments are the ones where the past is carefully left alone.