Beneath a lane named for bakers, archaeologists found the ghostly footprints of a medieval neighbourhood quietly layered over the bones of a Viking city. On Bakehouse Lane in Waterford, excavations carried out between 1986 and 1992 uncovered four medieval plots sitting directly above the filled-in remains of a Viking-age ditch. The sequence of occupation ran from the early or mid-twelfth century through to the early thirteenth, and what emerged was not a single building but a succession of structures, each generation of inhabitants building over and beside the work of the last.

Seven houses in total were recovered from this short stretch of lane, roughly sixty metres long. Six were classified as Dublin Type 1 houses and one as Dublin Type 2, a typology developed from excavations in Dublin that distinguishes between different forms of post-and-wattle construction common in Irish towns during this period. Dublin Type 1 houses were typically rectangular, with walls formed from woven hazel or willow rods supported by upright posts, an approach well suited to the cramped, replicated plots that characterised medieval urban life. Each of the Bakehouse Lane structures was aligned north to south and positioned about five metres from a surviving Viking wall, a detail that suggests the earlier Hiberno-Norse infrastructure continued to shape how the town was used and divided long after the Viking period itself had ended. The work was published by S. W. J. McCutcheon as part of a substantial volume on the Waterford excavations, edited by Maurice Hurley and colleagues, and issued by Waterford Corporation in 1997.