On the south side of John's Lane in Waterford city, the ground holds the remnants of an industry that was once both essential and deeply unpleasant to live beside. Tanning, the process of converting raw animal hides into leather using tannin-rich bark and water, was notoriously noxious work, and tanneries were typically pushed to the urban margins. What makes this particular site quietly interesting is the layering of its history: beneath where workers once soaked hides in sunken stone-lined pits, archaeologists found evidence of medieval garden cultivation, suggesting the ground had a quieter, domestic life long before the leather trade arrived.

The tannery's earliest documentary trace comes from a lease dated 1764, in which it appears almost incidentally, mentioned in relation to a Quaker Burial Ground situated just to the south-west of the site. That burial ground remained in use until 1824, meaning the two enterprises, one for the dead, one for hides, operated in close proximity for decades. By the time Leahy's map was drawn in 1835, the tannery was still active and apparently well established, but sometime between that survey and 1871 it fell out of use entirely. Archaeological testing of the site, carried out in 2000 and reported by J. Wren, uncovered the physical evidence that documents had long implied: the bases of tanning pits, the functional core of any such operation, along with the medieval garden deposits lying beneath them.