That cone, if the identification is correct, was the furnace tower of a glassworks, a structure designed to draw heat upward through a central fire and allow glassblowers to work at its base. Such towers were the defining silhouette of early modern glass manufacture across Britain and Ireland, and their presence in a cityscape was a reliable sign of industrial ambition.

The evidence for this particular site rests on a single drawn image. In 1698, the English artist Francis Place produced a view that includes a distinctive cone-shaped building, which the antiquary Maher, writing in 1932, identified as a probable glassworks and reproduced as Plate XI in his study. Place was a careful draughtsman, known for topographical accuracy, and the cone he recorded would have been a recognisable industrial form to any contemporary viewer. Beyond that, the record goes quiet. The precise location within Dublin's south city has not been established, and no further documentation appears to have survived to confirm who operated the works, how long it functioned, or what it produced.

Because the site has never been precisely located, there is nothing to visit in any conventional sense. What survives is the image itself, which remains the starting point for anyone curious enough to follow the thread. Researchers interested in early Dublin industry or in Francis Place's Irish drawings might find the Maher reference a useful entry point, though tracking down the 1932 publication may require a visit to a specialist library or archive. The cone has long since vanished from the skyline, absorbed into the ordinary fabric of a city that has been rebuilt many times over, but the drawing preserves the outline of something that was, briefly, worth recording.