Yet the coursed stone boundary that runs for miles around 1,752 acres of parkland, rising to nearly three metres in height, was the subject of a prolonged and acrimonious dispute between a seventeenth-century stonemason and a crown official before a single agreed stretch of it was even finished.

The land itself was seized from the Priory of Kilmainham by the crown in the early seventeenth century to create a royal deer park, with a viceregal country residence sited where the present Magazine Fort now stands. Construction of the enclosing wall began in 1662, and a Dublin mason named Henry Gamble was engaged by William Dodson, acting on behalf of the king, to build a substantial portion of it at a rate of four shillings and sixpence per perch, a perch being roughly five metres. What followed was a dispute recorded in unusual detail in the historical manuscripts. Two thirds of what Gamble had built was ordered to be taken down and remade, the problem being that he had constructed it as a dry wall, without mortar, and the soft stone had begun to crumble when exposed to sun and weather. Gamble argued he had not been instructed otherwise; Dodson argued the fault lay with the mason. A formal measurement and arbitration carried out in August 1665 found that Gamble had in fact built nearly 1,931 metres of wall to a good standard and was owed a further fifty-two pounds sterling. A second phase of wall building followed in 1680, when Sir John Temple built the section incorporating lands south of the Liffey, with the Chapelizod road taken as the southern boundary. The wall was accessed through eight gates, at Parkgate Street, Chapelizod, Castleknock, the North Circular Road, Cabra, Ashtown, Knockmaroon, and Islandbridge, with additional private entrances at Farmleigh, Mount Sackville Convent, and Marlborough Cavalry Barracks.

The wall is most easily appreciated by walking close to it near the Castleknock or Chapelizod gates, where the coursed masonry and stone capping are clearly visible and relatively undisturbed by later intervention. The Castleknock gate itself sits near the original boundary line that ran along the old Castleknock road before the walls were straightened in 1671. Those interested in the Gamble dispute will find the relevant primary documents in the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde, published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1885, which reproduce the surveyors' measurements and the competing claims in full.