What came to light was not a single building but evidence of four separate pre-Norman houses, a density that points to an established domestic settlement rather than an isolated structure, and one that was already old when the political world above it was about to change entirely.

Archaeological investigations in 1992 uncovered the traces of these four houses, at least one of which has been identified as a Type-1 house, a classification used by scholars of Viking-age Dublin to describe a particular form of post-and-wattle construction associated with the Hiberno-Norse period, when Dublin functioned as a Scandinavian-influenced urban settlement. The excavations also revealed a portion of a 13th-century structure, indicating that the site continued to be built upon after the Norman consolidation of the city. Among the finds was a Hiberno-Norse coin dating to around 1060, a small object that, in the context of numismatic history, belongs to a distinctive series of coins minted in Ireland under Norse influence and broadly modelled on English types of the period. That a single coin of this date turned up here is less a curiosity than a confirmation: people were living, trading, and losing things on this ground nearly a thousand years ago. The findings were reported by Gowen in 1993, drawing on fieldwork directed by Wallace.

Because this is an archaeological site rather than a standing monument, there is nothing visible at ground level for a visitor to seek out. The evidence lives in reports, finds archives, and specialist literature rather than in any accessible ruin or interpretive display. Those with a particular interest in the archaeology of medieval Dublin would do well to consult the broader work emerging from excavations across the south city, much of which is held in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland or accessible through the Irish Archaeological Archive. The coin and associated finds represent a rare material link to the Hiberno-Norse city, and the stratigraphic sequence, pre-Norman houses overlaid by a 13th-century structure, maps out in miniature the broader transition that reshaped Dublin after 1169.