By the time it was put to its second use as part of a riverside revetment, that beam had already served as a roof-timber somewhere else. The sequence of structures it belonged to tells a quiet story about medieval land hunger and the slow, deliberate work of pushing a town's usable ground further into a river.

Excavations directed by Ian Doyle uncovered a layered history of riverbank management in the area known as Irishtown, roughly forty metres northwest of where the Irishtown Gate once stood in the town wall. The earliest intervention was a post-and-wattle fence along the water's edge, the kind of lightweight barrier woven from upright stakes and interlaced branches that was a standard tool of early medieval boundary-making and land reclamation. This was eventually replaced by something more substantial: a masonry revetment wall running just over five metres in length, about a metre wide and sixty centimetres high, accompanied by a timber revetment that incorporated the reused roof-beam. A revetment, in this context, is a retaining wall or facing built to hold back soil and prevent a bank from slipping into the water, effectively fixing the edge of reclaimed ground in place. The whole arrangement ran alongside medieval timber houses, meaning that this stretch of riverbank was not a working quayside or a marginal wasteland but an occupied, domestic part of town, with buildings immediately behind the revetted edge.