On the north shore of the Liffey, somewhere in what is now the dense urban fabric of Dublin's north city, a small cluster of houses once stood looking out across the river. They left nothing behind, no stonework, no earthwork, no fragment of wall absorbed into a later building. What survives is a single cartographic moment, a dot on a seventeenth-century map that records their existence and, in doing so, raises more questions than it answers.

The evidence comes from a map drawn in 1673 by the military engineer Bernard de Gomme, who surveyed Dublin for the Crown and produced one of the most detailed plans of the city from that period. His map shows a group of four houses positioned on the north bank of the Liffey, directly opposite the eastern end of Hawkins Wall on the south side. Hawkins Wall was a significant feature of early modern Dublin, a riverside wall on the southern bank that helped define the city's edge along the water. The four houses shown by de Gomme appear to have sat in relative isolation at this location, separate from the denser settlement further west. Whether they were occupied by merchants, labourers, or tradespeople connected to river traffic, the notes do not say, and the map itself offers no further detail. The reference to this cluster appears in De Courcey's 1996 study of the Liffey, which drew on de Gomme's survey as a record of what the riverfront looked like before later centuries of development erased so much of it.

There is no visible trace of these buildings today, which makes this less a site to visit than a place to think about while walking the north quays. If you are interested in tracing the outline of de Gomme's 1673 map against the present streetscape, the area around the north bank roughly opposite where Hawkins Street meets the south quays is the approximate zone. The buildings shown on the map would have been close to water that has since been pushed back and embanked. A copy of de Gomme's map, which has been reproduced in various historical studies of Dublin, is worth examining beforehand; it gives a strong sense of how sparse and uneven settlement on the north side of the river still was in the late seventeenth century, well before the great northside expansion of the eighteenth century transformed the area entirely.