It is the kind of detail that rewards a slow reading of the map, easy to pass over among the tangle of lanes and building plots, yet quietly revealing about how the prosperous classes of Georgian Dublin organised their leisure.

Rocque, a Huguenot cartographer working in Britain and Ireland during the mid-eighteenth century, produced his large-scale map of Dublin in 1756 and it remains one of the most valuable documents for understanding the city's layout before the great Georgian expansion reshaped it. Bowling greens of this period were not the indoor carpet affairs familiar today, but open-air grass lawns, usually private or semi-private, where a form of lawn bowls was played as a fashionable pastime. Their presence in a neighbourhood was a reliable signal of relative wealth and social ambition. The north city at this time was still a desirable address, home to merchants, professionals, and minor gentry, before the centre of gravity shifted southward toward Merrion and Fitzwilliam squares later in the century. The appearance of a bowling green in this part of Dublin fits neatly into that picture of a prosperous, sociable urban district.

The precise location as marked by Rocque is the most useful guide available. His 1756 map has been georeferenced and is accessible through several online historical mapping projects, including the Dublin City Council digital heritage resources, where it can be overlaid against modern street layouts. Comparing the two gives a reasonable sense of where the green once sat, though the streetscape has changed considerably in the intervening centuries and no physical trace is likely to survive. For anyone interested in this kind of urban archaeology, the exercise of tracing a vanished feature through a historic map is worthwhile in itself, and Rocque rewards the attention with a city that is recognisable yet genuinely strange, full of details that have since disappeared without record.