Yet somewhere on the eastern side of a sixteenth-century Dublin castle, one such structure once existed, its memory preserved almost by accident in a single scholarly reference rather than by any stone or plaque.

The latrine in question was associated with Fyans Castle, a building that stood in the south city area of Dublin and was constructed in 1571. The castle itself belongs to a period of intense urban development and consolidation in late Tudor Dublin, when the city was expanding beyond its medieval core and wealthy merchants or administrators were raising substantial stone structures within and just outside the old walls. Historian Clarke, writing in 2002, notes the presence of a public latrine on the eastern side of the castle, a detail that is easy to pass over but which carries real historical weight. Public latrines in urban settings of this era were practical necessities, often positioned to drain into a nearby watercourse or channel, and their provision beside a castle or civic building suggests a degree of organised sanitation that tends to be underestimated when we picture early modern Irish towns.

This is emphatically a site for the historically curious rather than the visitor seeking something to see. Clarke's reference does not precisely locate the structure, and no physical remains are recorded as surviving. What draws attention to it is less the object itself than the gap it represents: an everyday facility, built into the fabric of a sixteenth-century Dublin streetscape, now vanished so completely that even its approximate position cannot be pinned down. Anyone exploring the south city with an interest in how ordinary urban infrastructure was managed in this period might use the reference as a starting point for looking at the broader archaeology of Fyans Castle, though that structure too appears to have left little above ground. The value is in the question the latrine raises, not in any physical encounter with it.