The external face of the medieval town wall runs beneath the property boundaries and footings of nineteenth and twentieth-century buildings for a total distance of 43 metres, meaning that generations of residents have been living, quite literally, on top of a defensive structure whose origins predate their homes by centuries. A short distance away, ivy-covered walls at the rear of No. 35 Mary Street may represent the remains of a late medieval property, and the Tholsel, a building that once served administrative and commercial functions in a medieval town, survives in some form on Gaol Lane. Neither has been examined in detail.

The excavation that brought much of this to light was carried out by archaeologist Celie O'Rahilly under licence 00E0423. Eight cuttings were dug across two sites divided by Sheep Street, one inside the former walled town and one outside it. The wall itself, when exposed to its full depth at the southern end of Cutting 2, measured 2.8 metres deep, though its width varied noticeably, narrowing to roughly 1 metre at the southern end compared to 2 metres further along. That narrowing may reflect a later addition to the wall's foundation, or it may relate to the nearby Gaol Lane Gate, a mural gate, meaning a gate set directly into the town wall, whose structural remains may account for a second wall found abutting the first. Inside the walled area, organic deposits containing bone, shell, and a single sherd of local medieval pottery were found at depths of up to 2.2 metres. The Civil Survey of the 1650s, as compiled by Simington in 1938, had described several houses in this area, most of them cagework timber-framed structures, with one stone building noted as sitting east upon the town wall to the north of Gaol Lane. The rubble-filled cuttings yielded no clear structural evidence matching those mid-seventeenth-century descriptions. Outside the wall, pottery layers dating to the seventeenth or eighteenth century were identified, and comparable deposits further east have been interpreted as a late medieval town dump that was gradually reclaimed as garden ground by the late sixteenth century.

Sheep Street runs roughly north to south between Meat Market Lane and Gaol Lane, and the area is accessible on foot from the centre of King's Island. The standing ivy-clad walls behind No. 35 Mary Street are visible from the rear, though not formally presented to visitors. The site is an active urban area rather than a managed heritage attraction, so what can be seen above ground is fragmentary; the significance lies largely beneath the surface and in the documentary record. The Tholsel on Gaol Lane is worth locating, even in its current condition, as a rare surviving trace of Limerick's medieval civic infrastructure.