The practice, grim and deliberate, was a precaution taken against the dead returning to trouble the living, and it was applied in Ireland and across Europe to those who, for one reason or another, were denied burial in consecrated ground: suicides, the unbaptised, those suspected of being prone to walking. The precise location of this particular ground in Ballybough has not been firmly established, and the date of its use is equally uncertain.

The sole reference appears in a 1912 work by Weston St. John Joyce, who notes, almost in passing, that bodies were transfixed with stakes in a waste plot adjoining the crossroads at the bridge. Joyce does not elaborate on when the ground was in use, nor on how many burials it contained. Ballybough, which takes its name from the Irish Baile Bocht, meaning poor town, sat just north of the Tolka river on the edge of historic Dublin, a liminal area that accumulated the kinds of uses that the city proper preferred to keep at a distance. Crossroads burials of this type were not uncommon in Ireland; the intersection of roads was thought to confuse a revenant, preventing it from finding its way home.

For a visitor trying to locate any trace of this place today, the task is essentially one of reading the modern streetscape as a palimpsest. The Ballybough crossroads area, where the Tolka is crossed near Clonliffe Road, has been thoroughly absorbed into the urban fabric of north Dublin. There is nothing to mark the waste ground Joyce describes, and given the uncertainty about both its precise location and its date, it is unlikely that any physical evidence survives. What remains is the record itself, a single sentence in a century-old book pointing toward a practice that the city quietly carried out and then quietly forgot.