Today there is no visible trace of them, which is precisely what makes the image so arresting. What Malton captured was a building type that once shaped the domestic streetscape of seventeenth-century Dublin and has since been almost entirely erased from it.

Dutch Billies, as these houses are known, had a very particular appearance. The roof-ridge ran at right angles to the street rather than parallel to it, meaning that the front of the building presented a gable end to the passerby. In the more elaborate examples, this gable was masked by curved quadrant shapes sweeping upward to a very flat curved or triangular pediment, giving the roofline a stepped or scrolled silhouette recognisable across northern Europe in the same period. The houses were built of brick on stone foundations and designed to sit in continuous terraces. Builders kept costs down by placing fireplaces in the corners of rooms so that two adjoining houses could share a single large chimney-stack rather than each requiring their own. The roof pitch was steeper than became standard later in the century, and the rear returns, the small projecting wings at the back of the building, typically contained a modest closet on each floor. The architectural historian Maurice Craig, writing in 1980, documented these features in detail, and it is largely through his work and records like the Malton print that the building type can be understood at all.

There is nothing to see on the ground at this location today, which is itself a kind of historical fact worth sitting with. The north side of St Patrick's Cathedral is easily reached on foot through the Liberties, and the cathedral itself provides obvious orientation. Visitors who know what to look for, or what to look for the absence of, might find it worthwhile to compare Malton's 1793 image with the streetscape as it now stands. The print is reproduced in a number of published histories of Dublin's architecture and is accessible in several library collections. The gap between what Malton drew and what survives says something about how thoroughly the city was rebuilt across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leaving only documents where buildings once stood.