Meeting House Square in the Temple Bar area is today known for its outdoor cinema screen and weekend markets, which makes it easy to overlook what was found when archaeologists put spades into the earth there in 1993: a deep water channel, its sides reinforced with timber facing, speaking quietly of an industrial past that predates almost everything visible above ground.

The discovery was made during excavations carried out in 1993, recorded by Gowen in 1994. The channel itself was substantial enough in depth to suggest it had been cut to carry a meaningful volume of water, most likely to drive a mill wheel. To establish when the timber lining was laid, researchers used dendrochronology, a method of dating wood by analysing the pattern of annual growth rings and matching them against known regional chronologies. The result placed the felling of one of the timbers at 1349, give or take nine years. That date puts the structure squarely in the mid-fourteenth century, a period of considerable turbulence in medieval Dublin, falling as it does around the years of the Black Death, which reached Ireland in 1348. Water mills of this period were critical infrastructure, used primarily for grinding grain, and their placement along water channels or diversions from rivers was carefully chosen to maximise flow.

The site is not publicly accessible in any archaeological sense; the excavation has long since been backfilled and the square returned to everyday use. Visitors to Meeting House Square will find no marker or interpretive panel pointing to what lies below, which is in some ways typical of how medieval Dublin sits quietly underneath the modern city. The square is straightforward to reach, lying just off Essex Street East in Temple Bar, and is open throughout the year. Those with an interest in the archaeology of the area might find it worth pairing a visit with a trip to the nearby Dublinia exhibition, which covers Viking and medieval Dublin and helps provide context for the kind of urban milling infrastructure that this channel represents.