Nothing of it survives above ground. The quays, the jetties, the flanking pier walls, the towers that capped them, the covered vaulted walkway leading to a six-gun battery at the pierhead, all of it has gone. What remains is a street grid that still faintly echoes the old shape, and the knowledge, for those who look into it, that something remarkable once occupied this very ordinary-looking corner of the city.

The port was a proper enclosed dock, its entrance defined by two pier walls projecting into the river like arms, each terminating in a tower. The southern pier ran for nearly 400 feet, beginning at a three-sided tower at the foot of what old French cartographers called the Rue du Quay, the street now known as Bridge Street. Around 1500, according to the historians Fitzgerald and McGregor, a vaulted covered way was constructed along this southern wall, entered by a flight of steps at the end of Quay Lane and leading out to a battery at the pierhead near a flood-gate. The wall was repaired in 1640 to 1641 under Mayor William Comyn, and an inscription commemorating the work was recorded in Ferrar's History of Limerick, published in 1767. The tower at the end of that southern wall came down in 1693, and the consequences were catastrophic: the falling masonry detonated 250 barrels of gunpowder that had been stored inside. The explosion killed people, wrecked houses, blew out windows, and stripped roofs across the surrounding area. The northern pier wall was shorter, about 100 feet in length, and also ended in a tower. Between the two lay the dock itself, an irregular basin enclosed by quays and jetties, its shape recorded in the 1590 map held in Trinity College Dublin and on a later French military map, both of which are considerably more precise than the half-moon form suggested by the illustration in Pacata Hibernia, the Elizabethan account of the Irish wars.

The entire river wall of the town from the dock northwards to King John's Castle has also vanished, though the historian Harold Leask, writing in 1941, traced its diagonal line passing beneath the County Court House and across the yards west of the City Court House. Visitors to this part of Limerick will find no marker or visible remnant, but the old French map and the 1590 Trinity map, both available through published sources and digital archives, give a surprisingly detailed impression of what the enclosed port actually looked like. The junction of Bridge Street and Merchant's Quay is the place to stand and try to reconstruct it mentally, with the river at your back and the understanding that the ground beneath the street may still hold the footings of walls that once contained a small, fortified harbour.