The name encodes a layered history. The area around the cottage was known in earlier centuries as Dean's Ground, and also as Deansby, both names pointing to its long association with the Dean of St Canice's Cathedral. An inquisition held at the new Tholsel in Kilkenny in April 1628 recorded a certain Jac Martin in possession of a plot of land near the cemetery of St Patrick's, land he held from the Dean of St Canice's. That dean was at the time residing at what the document calls his manor of Donoghmore, elsewhere referred to as the Castle of Donoghmore, and seventeenth-century sources describe the same place as the Dean's Castle of Donoghmore. It was, in other words, a residence of some standing, tied to one of the most important ecclesiastical offices in the city. The castle itself stood within the grounds of what later became St Joseph's, though its precise footprint has not been established. The modest cottage named on the 1839 map is the closest surviving geographical anchor to wherever that structure once stood, and may well occupy the same ground or its immediate vicinity.