The sea wall constructed on the south side of the channel below Ringsend in 1715 was not built from cut stone or cast iron but from timber piles and woven wattle hurdle, the same basketwork technique used in prehistoric fencing and building, here pressed into service to hold back the sea. It is the kind of detail that tends to vanish from the historical record, obscured by the grander engineering works that followed, yet it tells you something particular about how early eighteenth-century builders worked with what was available.

According to De Courcy's 1996 account of the Liffey, the construction method was methodical if modest. Three rows of piles were driven in and braced together, then the two outer rows were sheeted with woven wattle panels to create a casing. That casing was subsequently filled with shingle and stones, bringing the structure to a height of around one and a half metres. The purpose was practical and pressing: Ringsend sat at the mouth of the Liffey and the channel needed protection to make the harbour usable for shipping. The wall was essentially an early attempt to stabilise and define the waterway at a time when Dublin's port was still finding its shape.

Ringsend today is a dense urban neighbourhood immediately south-east of the city centre, bordered by the Liffey to the north and the Grand Canal Docks to the west. The original 1715 structure has long since been absorbed into later developments along the waterfront, and there is nothing to mark the spot where wattle and shingle once did the work of masonry. What remains is the area's broader character as a place shaped by the sea and by centuries of effort to manage it. Anyone with an interest in vernacular engineering or early port history might find it worth reading De Courcy alongside a walk along the Poolbeg road, where the relationship between the land and the channel remains legible even if the earliest evidence of it does not.