In 1994, archaeological excavations at the rear of Kinlay House, on Lord Edward Street within Dublin's medieval city, uncovered the remains of five separate structures, the most complete of which turned out to be a post and wattle house. Post and wattle construction was the standard domestic building technique of medieval Irish towns, walls formed from upright wooden posts woven through with flexible rods of hazel or willow and typically daubed with clay or mud to keep out the wind. This particular example measured 6.7 metres long and 4 metres wide, and was oriented east to west, a modest but coherent domestic space that would have been entirely unremarkable to anyone walking past it in the twelfth century.

The objects recovered from the site give a small but legible picture of the people who lived here. Bronze pins, used for fastening clothing, and fragments of bone combs suggest ordinary personal grooming and dress, the kind of everyday material that rarely survives in the written record. Twelfth-century pottery recovered alongside these items helps anchor the occupation to the period following the Hiberno-Norse development of Dublin and broadly contemporary with the Anglo-Norman arrival in Ireland. The excavation was recorded by Gowan in 1995, and the five structures together suggest not an isolated dwelling but something closer to a streetscape or yard cluster, now entirely invisible beneath the present city fabric.

Kinlay House today operates as a hostel near Christ Church Cathedral, which itself sits at the core of the medieval city. The excavated area lies to the rear of the building and is not publicly accessible, so there is nothing to observe on a visit in the conventional sense. What the site offers instead is a prompt to read the existing streetscape differently. The area around High Street, Back Lane, and Fishamble Street preserves something of the medieval street pattern, and the ground levels hereabouts have been raised and altered by centuries of habitation and rebuilding. A visitor who knows that wattle houses once stood at this precise spot, their occupants combing their hair and pinning their cloaks, will find that knowledge changes how the neighbourhood sits in the mind.