A pillory, for those unfamiliar, was a wooden frame mounted on a post in which an offender's head and hands were locked, leaving them exposed to the crowd, to ridicule, and often to whatever the crowd felt like throwing. That this one existed is noted by Clarke, writing in 2002, who places its association with the archbishopric at around 1395. Where exactly it stood, however, is no longer known.

The liberty of St Sepulchre's was one of Dublin's medieval ecclesiastical liberties, a jurisdiction in which the Archbishop of Dublin held powers that in other areas would have belonged to the crown or the city corporation. This included the right to hold courts and, evidently, to administer punishments. By the late fourteenth century, the liberty had its own administrative infrastructure, and the presence of a pillory suggests a functioning system of public justice operating outside the city's civic authority. The record is frustratingly thin, but the detail Clarke preserves gives a glimpse of how discipline and display were managed in a neighbourhood that sat just beyond the city walls, in an area corresponding roughly to what is now the Liberties.

Because the pillory's precise location has not been identified, there is no specific spot to visit or mark to look for. The area around Kevin Street and the former palace of St Sepulchre's, which later became Kevin Street Garda Station, is the general territory in which this world operated. Walking those streets, it is worth knowing that the orderly Georgian and Victorian fabric visible today overlays a medieval landscape of competing jurisdictions, ecclesiastical courts, and very public consequences for those who fell foul of them. The absence of a fixed location is itself part of the story; this is the kind of detail that survives only as a footnote, the physical evidence long since gone.