It carries no plaque, attracts no visitors, and for centuries it went entirely unnoticed, buried under layers of urban development. What little is known about it emerged almost by accident, during excavations that brought a fragment of the city's earliest infrastructure briefly back into view.

In 1993, archaeological work at a site known as the 'Back of the Pipes' uncovered a watercourse running along both the northern and southern edges of the excavation area. The name itself is telling: 'Back of the Pipes' is a historical Dublin toponym that points directly to the city's old water supply system, a network of pipes and channels that carried fresh water into the medieval city. The exposed channel is thought to be part of the Dublin City watercourse, a distribution system that served this part of the city basin, and it has been dated to probably the thirteenth century. That places its construction within the period of the city's rapid expansion under Anglo-Norman influence, when Dublin was growing quickly enough to require organised water management at a civic scale. The findings were reported by Hayden in 1994, though the site itself has received little attention in the broader popular record since.

There is nothing to see here in the conventional sense. The watercourse is underground, and the area around the 'Back of the Pipes', located in the south city, carries few obvious signs of its medieval past. For anyone interested in the archaeology of water infrastructure, the interest lies less in visiting a specific point and more in reading the landscape: the topography of this part of Dublin still reflects, faintly, the routes that water once took through the city. Archaeological reports and the records held by bodies such as the National Monuments Service offer the clearest window onto what was found in 1993 and what it suggests about how the city once managed something as fundamental as a clean water supply.