It belonged to the Hospital of St John the Baptist, a medieval religious institution that once stood just outside the New Gate in the city's western walls, and it is the kind of place that exists more clearly in documents than on the ground. The fact that we know it existed at all, and can say something about what once surrounded it, makes the absence of any identifiable physical trace all the more quietly unsettling.

The earliest detailed glimpse of the site comes from the 1388 will of a man named John Hamound, who asked to be buried in the cemetery of St John, outside the New Gate, specifically before the door of a church dedicated to St Mary Magdalen. He left twenty shillings for masses and fifty pounds of wax to that church, which suggests it was a functioning place of some local importance. By 1540, however, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, a survey found the main church already demolished, its stone, tiles, timber, glass, and iron sold off by William Brabazon, the under-treasurer of Ireland, to buyers whose names were not recorded. The cemetery itself, described as containing about half an acre, was listed as unoccupied and worth nothing. Two smaller chapels within the precinct, one dedicated to St Eligius and one to St Margaret, had fared only slightly better. By 1609, what remained of the whole complex was granted in portions to a Thomas Luttrell, and the grant lists a striking assortment of features: a bawn (a walled enclosure, typically found around a house or religious complex), fifty cells for the sick, water-mills, an orchard, a garden, and a house called the Reverstre within the churchyard itself, suggesting the site had already been substantially repurposed.

Today the Augustinian friary of St John the Baptist occupies part of the north side of Thomas Street, and current thinking places the medieval hospital cemetery somewhere in and around that friary and the buildings immediately to its east and west. There is nothing to mark the spot, and the archaeology beneath this stretch of street has never been definitively investigated in relation to the hospital. Anyone walking past has no obvious reason to stop. The interest here is less in what you can see and more in the knowledge that the ground underfoot was once half an acre of medieval burial land, a chapel, and a complex of cells for the sick, all of it dismantled, sold, regranted, and gradually absorbed into the city without leaving a legible trace.