No church, no spire, no public marker of any kind; just a townhouse where priests gathered and Mass was said, in full defiance of the religious restrictions of the age. The house belonged to someone named Shelton, and its precise location has never been identified. What survives is a name, a street corner, and a government document that inadvertently preserved both.

The earliest known official record of Mass-houses in Dublin dates to 1618, when a Government list of Catholic clergy operating in the city was compiled during the reign of James I. A mass-house, in this context, was simply a private dwelling pressed into service as a makeshift place of worship, a necessary workaround under a Protestant administration that banned public Catholic practice. The list, described by the historian Nicholas Donnelly in his 1904 study of Dublin's Catholic chapels as "a very incomplete one," nonetheless names a handful of the private houses then serving as temporary chapels. Among the places described as "of most public note, whereunto the priests resort for Mass in Dublin" was Shelton's house, identified as lying beyond the bridge, at the corner of what the document calls "Hang-man-lane," the street we now know as Hammond Lane. The name of the lane itself carries a grim historical echo, though the document gives no further detail about Shelton or the building's eventual fate.

Hammond Lane today is a narrow street running between Arran Street West and Church Street, north of the Liffey, in an area that has changed considerably over the centuries. Because the precise location of Shelton's house within the lane has not been established, there is no specific building to seek out, and nothing marks the spot. The interest here is more archival than physical; the 1618 government list, preserved and discussed by Donnelly, offers a rare documentary glimpse into how Catholic religious life organised itself in early seventeenth-century Dublin, quietly, in borrowed rooms, at addresses the authorities apparently knew well enough to record.