What looks, at first glance, like an unremarkable concrete-sided watercourse turns out to conceal earlier stone masonry on its northern face, and the ground beneath it has repeatedly surprised archaeologists. Excavations in 2002 uncovered a drystone mill undercroft, a subterranean support structure built from rectangular stone blocks, alongside a tail-race, the channel carrying water away after it has driven the wheel, faced in rougher rubble. The mill appears to have been rebuilt on at least three separate occasions, with the earliest phases dating to the tenth or eleventh century.

The written record stretches back nearly as far. In the Great Pipe Rolls for the first year of Henry III's reign, Hugh, Bishop of Meath, records a mill on the manor of Chapelizod, and a 1305 entry notes a mill leased to one John de Selby. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 mentions a tuck mill, a mill used for processing cloth, in the area, and it appears on the accompanying Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656. Pre-development testing at the junction of Maiden Row and Chapelizod Road in 1994 added further texture: a clay-bonded riverfront revetment, a timber or stone facing built to stabilise a riverbank, was found to survive four courses high on the south-eastern side of the mill stream bridge. Finds from the ashy layer behind it, including fragments of brown-glazed Staffordshire ware, a tin-glazed plate, and hand-painted delft, suggest the structure predates the mid-eighteenth century, placing it before Rocque's well-known map of Dublin was produced. A Dutch clay pipe bowl dated to 1830 was also recovered nearby, hinting at continued activity along the water's edge well into the nineteenth century.

Chapelizod sits just beyond Phoenix Park on the south bank of the Liffey, and Maiden Row runs along the northern side of the millrace. The concrete sidings that now line much of the channel are a fairly recent addition, but the northern face rewards a closer look, where older stonework is visible beneath the later material. The site itself is not formally presented as a heritage location, so there is little in the way of signage or interpretation; what survives is largely below ground or embedded in the fabric of the streetscape. Finds from the various excavations, including medieval cooking ware, wood, and bone fragments recovered in 1994, give a sense of how densely layered this apparently ordinary corner of the village actually is.