It appears in the historical record only once, as a passing geographical marker in a ceremonial boundary-riding, and even then it is defined chiefly by its proximity to something else. That combination of fleeting documentation and uncertain position makes it one of the quieter puzzles in the city's early modern topography.

The reference comes from the Riding of the Franchises in 1603, a formal civic perambulation in which Dublin's officials would ride the boundaries of the city's jurisdiction to reaffirm and record them. The historian J. T. Gilbert, working from the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, noted the ford in his account of this event, placing it beside Bowe Bridge. The Riding of the Franchises was a practice common to many medieval and early modern towns, a way of keeping boundary knowledge alive in an era before reliable maps were routine. Gilbert, a prolific nineteenth-century archivist of Dublin's civic history, compiled and edited the Calendar of Ancient Records across multiple volumes, and it remains a foundational source for the city's administrative past. The brief mention of this ford is the kind of detail that survives almost by accident, recorded not because the ford itself was remarkable but because it happened to sit at a point along a boundary the city needed to name.

Because the ford has not been precisely located, there is no particular spot a visitor can stand and say with confidence that this is the place. Bowe Bridge itself is not a landmark that survives in any obvious way in the modern streetscape, which compounds the difficulty. The value here is less in visiting a location than in tracing the reference through the source material; Gilbert's Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin is held in major Irish libraries and is partially accessible through digitised archives. For anyone interested in the micro-geography of early modern Dublin, fords like this one are a reminder that the city's street-level logic was once shaped by water crossings that have since been culverted, built over, or simply forgotten.