The Poddle, once one of the capital's most significant watercourses, was gradually swallowed by the expanding city over the centuries, culverted and forgotten by most of the people who walk above it daily. Every so often, though, the ground gives it up again, and what lies below reasserts itself in unexpected ways.

In 1992, excavations in the area uncovered the roof of a culvert, a covered channel built to carry water underground, which was identified as almost certainly belonging to the Poddle. According to research by Gowen, published in 1993, the culvert was already in existence by 1673, meaning the structure had been quietly doing its work beneath the city for well over three hundred years before anyone dug down to find it. The Poddle itself has a much longer history still, having fed the city's medieval defences and supplied water to Dublin Castle, before the pressures of urban growth pushed it progressively underground from the eighteenth century onwards.

There is nothing to see at street level today, which is rather the point. The culvert is not a visitor attraction in any conventional sense, and access to the buried channel itself is not possible for the general public. What the site represents, instead, is a reminder that Dublin's historic street plan often conceals as much as it reveals. Those with an interest in the city's buried infrastructure sometimes trace the Poddle's approximate course on foot, following the dips and alignments of streets in the south city that reflect the old watercourse beneath. The area around the excavation site rewards a slow walk with a good map and some patience for what is absent rather than what is present.