A slipway, essentially a paved or timber-reinforced ramp running down into the water to allow boats to be launched, hauled out, or loaded, is the kind of utilitarian feature that rarely survives in either the physical or written record. This one is known only through two brief references, separated by three decades, suggesting it was a consistent enough feature of the quayside to be worth noting at all.

The historian Clarke recorded the existence of this slipway at the eastern end of the quay in entries dating to 1567 and again to 1598, a period when Dublin's riverfront was still a working, commercially active edge rather than the formalised embankment it would later become. The late sixteenth century was a time of considerable flux along the Liffey's southern bank, with the city's port infrastructure gradually shifting and expanding to accommodate growing trade. A slipway in this location would have served the practical demands of that commerce, offering a point where vessels could be managed at the waterline without the need for a full dock or quay wall. That it appears in sources some thirty years apart suggests it was not a temporary arrangement.

There is nothing to see at this location today, at least nothing that can be attributed to the slipway itself. The quayside has been substantially reworked over the centuries, and any physical trace would long since have been built over or washed away. What makes this worth knowing is less about visiting and more about reading the ground differently when you walk along Dublin's south quays; the eastern end of a now-unremarkable stretch of riverfront was once a functional edge of a Tudor-era city, recorded, if only briefly, as a place where boats and water met stone or timber in the ordinary business of the day.