It is the kind of discovery that reframes the familiar: Thomas Street, now a thoroughfare of shopfronts and traffic, was once a landscape shaped in part by moving water.

In 1995, excavations at 119-121 Thomas Street uncovered what appears to have been a watercourse running east to west, measuring around 6.5 metres wide and approximately one metre deep. Along its southern bank, the decayed remains of timber planks were identified as a revetment, a structure used to stabilise and retain an earthen or riverine bank, preventing erosion and keeping the edge of a watercourse in a defined line. The findings were recorded by Gowen in 1995 and represent a fragmentary but telling glimpse of the medieval or earlier topography of this part of Dublin's southside. The precise date of the watercourse and its revetment was not firmly established, but the presence of such managed riverside infrastructure suggests deliberate human activity in an area that would later become densely built over as the city expanded westward from its early core.

Thomas Street today gives little outward indication of what lies beneath. The site at 119-121 sits within a stretch of the street that has seen considerable development over the centuries, and there is no marker or public interpretation to indicate the find. Visitors with an interest in the buried layers of Dublin's urban past may find it worth pausing here simply to consider the depth of time beneath the pavement, even if the revetment itself is invisible and inaccessible. The record of this excavation is held within the broader archive of Irish archaeological investigation, and those wishing to pursue the detail further can consult Gowen's 1995 report through the National Monuments Service Sites and Monuments Record.