That it was described as deep is itself telling. Fords were typically chosen for their shallowness, their negotiability on foot or horseback, so a deep ford implies something more deliberate, perhaps a point where crossing was possible only under certain conditions of tide or season, or where the river bed offered firmer footing than the surrounding terrain.

The reference appears in an account of Riding the Franchises, a formal civic ceremony in which the boundaries of Dublin's jurisdictional limits were physically traversed and confirmed by city officials on horseback. The practice was a way of asserting and maintaining municipal authority over a defined territory, and the written record of the 1603 riding was compiled by J. T. Gilbert from the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, a monumental archive of civic documentation that Gilbert edited in the nineteenth century. The mention of the deep ford would have served a practical purpose in that context, as a landmark or waypoint used to orient the riders as they followed the franchise boundary. Its inclusion suggests it was recognisable and significant enough to be cited as a reference point, even if no further description was thought necessary.

Beyond that single entry, the ford's precise location is not known. No later source appears to have pinned it down, and the landscape through which the 1603 riders travelled has been so thoroughly altered by centuries of development that physical evidence is unlikely to survive above ground. For anyone interested in the history of Dublin's water geography, the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin remains the most direct route to the source material, and Gilbert's editorial work across its multiple volumes offers a broader picture of how the city's boundaries and features were understood and documented in the early modern period. The ford itself, wherever it once lay, belongs to that category of places that persist only as a notation, a single word in a margin of civic memory.