That the site was once known simply as the Court, and that it served the Archbishops of Dublin across several centuries, makes the modesty of the physical remains all the more arresting. The ground here has been built over, dug into, and reinterpreted so many times that the archaeology has become a kind of puzzle, with each investigation producing a slightly different answer.

The story of the site reaches back to 1181, when Archbishop Comyn established a manor that appears to have occupied the same ground now taken by a convent, recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1843 as Springmount and later known as Fortwilliam. In 1228 Archbishop Luke formalised an episcopal residence there, and by the early fourteenth century, during the tenure of Alexander de Bicknor, who held the See of Dublin between 1317 and 1319, the complex had acquired sufficient status to be referred to as the Court. Contemporary references describe a substantial mansion, with stone walls, leaden gutters, iron bars, a kitchen, a brewhouse, and furnaces, suggesting a working household of some scale. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 still records a stone house at Oldcourt on the church farm at Finglas, indicating the structures had not entirely disappeared by the mid-seventeenth century.

Archaeological work carried out in 1992 found no physical trace of the medieval residence, which was itself a notable result, suggesting either deep disturbance or simple mislocation. Excavations in 1995 were more productive, uncovering the rectangular two-roomed structure now associated with sixteenth and seventeenth century material, interpreted by the excavator Andrew Halpin as an outbuilding connected to Fortwilliam rather than the residence itself. The site is within the grounds of what became convent land, and public access is not straightforward. Those with an interest in the archaeology will find the detail in Halpin's 1996 report and in Francis Erlington Ball's earlier survey work, both of which give a clearer picture of what the ground once held than anything visible today.