The street name is not coincidental; this corner of the city was once a distinct enclave for Huguenot settlers, the Protestant refugees who left France in large numbers after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, stripping them of their right to worship freely. Their presence in Cork left marks on the urban fabric that are easy to walk past without recognising them for what they are.

The congregation built a church on this site in 1712, and in 1733 the property was extended to accommodate a graveyard. The church itself did not survive the nineteenth century; it was demolished around 1845, and a Methodist chapel was subsequently erected on the same ground, one which, according to contemporary accounts, extended over part of the old Huguenot burial area. By the early twentieth century, only a handful of gravestones remained. A survey conducted between 1901 and 1903 recorded four stones, two of them bearing dates of 1787 and 1779. A photograph published later by St Leger shows a further stone dated 1773, suggesting the burial ground was in active use across at least several decades of the eighteenth century.

What remains today is a layered and somewhat compressed piece of history, where a Huguenot graveyard, a demolished church, and a later chapel occupy the same narrow plot. The gravestones that were recorded are few, and the chapel has long since altered the footprint of the original ground. Even so, the location rewards a slow look, particularly given how little else survives in Irish cities to mark the Huguenot presence so directly.