It is the kind of thing that passes unnoticed for decades, its scale absorbed into the surrounding streetscape until someone stops to look properly.

The architectural historian Maurice Craig noted this structure in his 1969 survey of Dublin, citing it at pages 77 to 78 and placing it in the vicinity of Tailors' Hall. A pedimented gateway, to describe the term briefly, is an entrance framed by a triangular gable, the pediment, borrowed from classical architecture and typically used to signal ceremony or civic importance. That such a feature exists here, partially buried under later construction, suggests it once served a grander arrangement of buildings than what surrounds it today. Tailors' Hall itself, on Back Lane, is the oldest surviving guild hall in Ireland, dating to the early eighteenth century, and the presence of a formal gateway nearby is consistent with the kind of institutional boundary-marking that accompanied such buildings. Whether the gateway was part of the original hall complex or belonged to a related structure is not entirely clear from the surviving record.

The gateway is not a conventional visitor destination and there is no formal access or interpretation on site. It is the sort of detail that rewards people who are already moving slowly through the Back Lane and Cornmarket area with their eyes up and their attention on the layers of the city rather than on any single monument. Tailors' Hall itself is occasionally open to the public through organised events, and a visit to that building provides the closest legitimate context for understanding what the gateway represents. Going in daylight is advisable simply because the structural detail, stonework and the remnants of the pediment, is easier to read in good light rather than under street lamps.