One such crossing, now entirely absorbed into the urban fabric of south Dublin, once carried travellers from the vicinity of Ringsend across open strand to a place then known as Lazar's Hill. That name alone hints at something worth pausing over: Lazar is a corruption of Lazarus, the patron of lepers, and hills bearing this name were typically associated with leper hospitals or isolation settlements on the fringes of medieval towns. The crossing that led to it was practical, unglamorous, and for centuries completely unremarkable to those who used it daily.

The historian John de Courcy, writing in 1996, records this fording point in his account of Dublin's waterways and coastal geography. The route he describes would have taken travellers from Ringsend, at the time a small fishing settlement and an important landing point for ships that could not navigate further upriver, across the tidal strand toward Lazar's Hill. This was not a crossing through open water but across the kind of shifting, sandy ground that the tide exposes and reclaims. Such crossings were highly dependent on tidal conditions and local knowledge; getting the timing wrong could mean being caught on ground that became impassable or dangerous as the water returned. The strand in question lay in what is now the general area around Ringsend and the reclaimed land that would later become much of the south docklands.

There is nothing to see at this location in any conventional sense. The strand is long gone, reclaimed over centuries of development, and the crossing itself left no monument. What a visitor can do is stand somewhere near Ringsend and look across toward the Grand Canal Dock or the ground rising slightly toward what was once Lazar's Hill, now the area around Townsend Street and Pearse Street, and try to reconstruct the geography in the mind. The transformation of this part of Dublin from tidal estuary to dense city happened incrementally, and almost nothing of the earlier landscape survives at surface level. Maps from the eighteenth century can help; the contrast between those early charts and what stands there now gives a clearer sense of how thoroughly the shoreline was rearranged.