But in the sixteenth century it was a visible, navigable fact of city life, and at one particular point it was crossed by a small bridge whose name gestures at something now entirely vanished: a gate in the city wall.

The structure in question was known as Pole Gate Bridge, taking its name from the Pole Gate, one of the fortified entrances through Dublin's medieval defences. The bridge lay immediately outside that gate, carrying traffic across the Poddle at what would have been a significant threshold between the walled city and the ground beyond it. A documentary reference from 1574, cited in John T. Gilbert's nineteenth-century compilation of Dublin records and further noted by Bradley and King, confirms the bridge was a recognised feature of the urban landscape by that date, though it is almost certainly older. The Poddle itself was no minor watercourse; it fed the city's water supply and the defensive moat, and controlling crossings over it mattered. The Pole Gate and its associated bridge would have seen merchants, officials, and ordinary Dubliners passing in and out of the city on a daily basis.

There is nothing physically to see today. The Poddle runs underground through this part of the city, and the Pole Gate itself is long gone, leaving no surface trace that a casual visitor could identify. What remains is the record, the name, and the faint sense, when walking the streets of Dublin's south city, that the ground underfoot has been layered with use for a very long time. Researchers interested in medieval Dublin's topography can pursue the sources through Gilbert's calendars of ancient records and the Bradley and King survey, both of which treat this corner of the city's past with some care.