What they uncovered was a clay surface, a remnant of an earthen bank once cut from the side and bed of the River Poddle, and it speaks quietly to the practical anxieties of people living at the edge of a medieval waterway more than eight centuries ago.

The find came from work carried out at 35 Parliament Street, where the basement deposits yielded not only the compacted clay surface but also twelfth-century pottery and roof tiles. Taken together, these materials point to the Hiberno-Norse period of Dublin's development, that layered era when Norse settlers had long since intertwined with the native Irish population and Dublin functioned as a significant urban centre on the edge of the wider Norse world. A revetment, in this context, is essentially a retaining structure, something built or shaped to stabilise a bank and prevent the ground from slipping or eroding into the water. Rather than timber piling or stone facing, which appear elsewhere in Dublin's medieval riverine archaeology, what survived here was the earthwork itself, shaped from the river's own bed and bank. Scally's 1995 report placed this feature within the broader effort to define and defend the settlement's margins against the Poddle, a river that once ran with considerably more influence through the city's lower ground than its largely culverted modern course would suggest.

The site sits along what is now one of Dublin's more commercial streets, and there is nothing visible at street level to indicate what lies beneath. The basement context means the archaeology is entirely inaccessible to the public in the ordinary sense. What a curious visitor can do, however, is walk the line of the Poddle's old course through the city, sections of which have been mapped and discussed in various historical surveys of Dublin's watercourses. Parliament Street itself runs close to where the Poddle once met the Liffey, and standing at that junction on a wet day, when the ground feels heavy underfoot, it is not difficult to imagine why the people who lived here in the twelfth century thought it worth the effort of shifting earth to keep the water at bay.