Medieval Dublin's riverfront was a working, practical thing, and at the site now associated with King's Inns, a slip and courtyard once opened directly onto the water. The arrangement was functional and modest, serving the movement of goods and people along a river that was, in the thirteenth century, still very much the economic spine of the city.

The earliest reference to this feature places it in the thirteenth century, when the quay comprised a simple slip, essentially a sloped landing area leading down to the water, set within a courtyard bounded by the riverbank. The configuration is recorded by John de Courcy, and what makes this detail more tangible is that it survived, in broadly similar form, long enough to be captured cartographically. John Speed's map of Dublin, produced in 1610, shows this general arrangement still in place, suggesting a continuity of layout across several centuries. Clarke's 2002 study draws the connection between the medieval record and the Speed survey, giving the site a documentary thread that most stretches of the north quays simply cannot claim.

The site today sits within the broader King's Inns precinct, the area around Henrietta Street and Constitution Hill on the north side of the city. The medieval waterfront itself is long gone, absorbed by the successive reclamations and reconstructions that pushed the Liffey's edge southward and regularised its banks over the centuries. There is nothing visible at ground level that corresponds to the slip or courtyard. The interest here is largely one of layering, of standing in a place and knowing that the ground underfoot has a much older relationship with the river than the Georgian and Victorian fabric around you would suggest. Anyone curious about how the medieval city actually functioned, as a port, as a working waterfront, rather than as a collection of monuments, will find the archival picture worth pursuing through the sources cited by de Courcy and Clarke.