The trouble is that nobody is entirely sure where it stood, whether it was ever actually built, or whether the record of it has been conflated with an entirely different gate. No visible remains survive above ground. The site does not appear on John Speed's 1610 map of Dublin, nor on John Rocque's detailed 1756 survey of the city. What exists instead is a single documentary entry, a later scholarly map, and a set of overlapping questions that historians have not been able to fully resolve.

The paper trail begins with the Dublin City Assembly Roll of 1465, which recorded that the city granted the prior and convent of the Carmelites of Dublin the lane running from the church of Saint Stephen's to the church of Saint Kevin's, along with the right to build a gateway at both ends. The Carmelite friary in question was the establishment that would later become associated with Whitefriar Street. Scholars have noted that the Register of Municipal Privileges entry for a gate at Bow Lane East may in fact be a duplicate record for Whitefriar's Gate, a separate and better-documented structure. Complicating matters further, St Kevin's Gate already existed to the east of St Kevin's Church, and that gate dates from the thirteenth century, appearing in a description of the city from 1326 to 1327. The 1465 grant suggests that if the Carmelite gates were ever erected, they would have been freestanding structures marking the private boundaries of a friary lane, a fairly specific category of urban infrastructure distinct from the main defensive gates of the medieval town. The site was noted in a Friends of Medieval Dublin map published in 1978, and mentioned by Bradley and King in 1987, but Clarke, writing in 2002, could only conclude that the location remained unknown.

Archaeological testing carried out in 1995 by Mary McMahon, under licence number 95E0017, examined ground to the rear of numbers 15 to 18 Aungier Street, which backs onto Bow Lane. Three trenches were excavated, but the results were discouraging: where cellars and basements existed they had removed any earlier deposits, and in the surviving pockets the archaeologists found only modern fill sitting directly on natural clays, with no archaeologically significant stratigraphy present. For anyone drawn to the area out of curiosity, the streets around Bow Lane East and Aungier Street still follow broadly medieval alignments, and the proximity of Whitefriar Street Church marks the approximate territory of the old friary. The gateway itself, if it ever rose above the lane, left nothing behind to find.