They pre-dated the tenement basements built above them, and pointed instead to an earlier phase of the city's northside, one that most visitors walking Capel Street today would have little reason to suspect.

The excavations took place in 1995, at the rear of 107 to 109 Capel Street, as part of the ongoing work to document Dublin's layered urban fabric. The walls uncovered may be connected to a 17th-century house associated with William Conolly, better known as Speaker Conolly, one of the most powerful political figures in early 18th-century Ireland. Conolly served as Speaker of the Irish House of Commons from 1715 until his death in 1729, and accumulated considerable wealth and property during his lifetime, most famously at Castletown House in County Kildare. That a residence of his, or one linked to his name, might have stood in this part of the northside is a reminder of how thoroughly the social geography of Dublin has shifted. Capel Street was, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a fashionable address; its subsequent history as a street of small traders, tenements, and dense working-class occupation effectively buried that earlier character, sometimes quite literally.

The site itself is not publicly accessible, lying as it does beneath and behind active commercial properties. What survives, to the extent that anything does, is archaeological rather than visible. The findings were documented by Conway in 1996, and are held within the broader record of Dublin urban excavations. For anyone interested in the material, the excavations archive and associated reports are the most direct route to the detail. The stretch of Capel Street between the Liffey and Bolton Street repays a slow walk, not for any single dramatic feature, but for the way its current appearance sits so awkwardly against what the ground underneath it has occasionally given up.