The name alone tells you something about how ordinary public execution once was as a feature of the urban landscape, ordinary enough that a site could acquire it as a casual toponym, a label passed between locals until it ended up on a map. What makes this particular entry so quietly arresting is precisely how little survives of it: a name, a general area, and the unsettling suggestion that the gallows it referred to was already considered old by the time anyone thought to write it down.

The reference surfaces in the account of Riding the Franchises in 1603, a civic ritual in which city officials formally rode the boundaries of Dublin's jurisdiction to assert and reaffirm them. The record was prepared by J. T. Gilbert from the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, Vol. 1, and it is within a Down Survey composite map for County Dublin, compiled between 1655 and 1656, that the place called the Ould Gallows appears. The Down Survey itself was a vast mapping project carried out under William Petty following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, intended primarily to facilitate the redistribution of confiscated land. That a gallows site warranted inclusion as a named landmark, even under the older designation of Ould, suggests it had long functioned as a meaningful point of reference in the local geography, the kind of place people used to orient themselves even after its original purpose had faded.

For anyone hoping to visit, the honest answer is that there is no precise location to visit. The site has not been definitively identified, and the map reference places it somewhere within the broad area of Dublin's north city without pinning it to a street or a field. What remains is the documentary trace itself, accessible through Gilbert's published Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, which is held in various Irish library collections including the National Library of Ireland. For those drawn to the archaeology of place names rather than standing structures, the north city rewards a certain kind of attention: streets and districts here carry older names beneath their current ones, and the Ould Gallows is a reminder that the city's more uncomfortable landmarks were once just as permanent a part of the map as any church or bridge.