It is the kind of detail that barely survives the centuries, and in this case it survives only as a single line in a late seventeenth-century account, its exact position unrecorded and likely unrecoverable. That combination of specificity and vagueness is itself revealing: someone noted it down because it was there, a fixture of the landscape unremarkable enough not to require explanation, and yet no one thought to say precisely where.

The source is John Dunton, an English bookseller and writer who visited Ireland in the 1690s and left behind a series of letters and observations that were later edited by Edward MacLysaght and published in 1982. Writing in 1698, Dunton describes a gallows or gibbet at Ringsend, a coastal settlement at the mouth of the River Liffey that at the time functioned as Dublin's main landing point for passengers and goods arriving by sea. A gibbet was a form of gallows used not only for execution but sometimes for displaying the bodies of the already-executed, suspended in chains as a warning to others, and the distinction between the two terms was not always consistently observed by contemporary writers. Ringsend's position as a busy maritime entry point would have made it a logical place for such a structure, where the sight of it would have greeted travellers arriving by water into the city.

Because the site is not precisely located, there is nothing specific to seek out. Modern Ringsend is a dense urban neighbourhood, and whatever open ground once bordered the shore has long been absorbed into the city. The value here is less in visiting than in reading the area with a slightly different awareness, knowing that Dunton's brief observation places a gallows somewhere in this vicinity in the final years of the seventeenth century. Anyone interested in pursuing the primary record further can consult MacLysaght's 1982 edition of Dunton's Irish writings, which preserves the original passage in context.