What was found here is not a monument in the conventional sense but a sequence of riverside earthworks, each generation replacing the last, recording a community's ongoing negotiation with a tidal river that did not cooperate.

Excavations carried out between 1977 and 1978 revealed at least three distinct phases of embankment construction dating to the Viking period. The earliest was a low flood bank from the early tenth century, modest in scale and evidently insufficient, since it was superseded by a more substantial structure built around a pre-existing wattle fence. A wattle fence used in this context would have served as a retaining framework, with woven rods of hazel or willow holding back packed earth and debris. That second phase was itself eventually superseded when a third bank was pushed further out into the river bed during the later tenth century, a considerably more assertive intervention. That final earthen bank was in turn replaced by a stone wall, suggesting the settlement had reached a point where it could commit more durable materials to the problem. The findings were published by Pat Wallace, who recorded the phasing and dimensions across the 1977 to 1979 excavation reports.

The site lies within Dublin's south city, in an area that would have sat along the early medieval waterfront before centuries of reclamation extended the city's footprint southward into what had been the river. There is nothing to see above ground today; the embankments survive only as archaeological deposits beneath modern development. Visitors interested in what was uncovered here are better directed to the National Museum of Ireland, which holds material from the broader Wood Quay and Fishamble Street excavations of the same period, and where the material culture of Viking Dublin is displayed in some depth. The south city waterfront zone repays attention as a place to simply stand and consider the scale of transformation involved, knowing that the present ground level is built, layer by layer, on top of decisions made a thousand years ago.