The exact spot is disputed, with researchers placing it variously at the eastern or western end of Hoey's Court, but the general neighbourhood has preserved its associations in quietly telling ways. A lane nearby was referred to as "prison lane" as far back as 1430, and a later alley in the same area carried the name "Gun-alley," a remnant of the military function that eventually succeeded the gaol on the same ground.

The city's claim over this prison had a formal legal basis. In 1309, the mayor and citizens of Dublin asserted custody of the Gaol of Dublin City as a right granted under charter from King John, who had issued his original grant of liberties to the city in the early thirteenth century. By 1481, the administration of the gaol had become bureaucratic enough to generate paperwork: the Dublin Assembly Roll recorded an order that Pers Cruise, swordbearer of the city, be formally discharged from his responsibilities as keeper of the gaol. In the seventeenth century, the site's function shifted again. The area to the south of St Werburgh's became the location of the city's "Main Guard," a military post associated with the courts-martial records of the Cromwellian Protectorate. John Gilbert, writing in 1854, noted that the Main Guard was afterwards converted into a watch-house, a kind of early civic security post, while Gun-alley next to it was still storing the parish fire engines at the start of the nineteenth century.

Hoey's Court today is a quiet and easily overlooked lane running close to St Werburgh's, a Church of Ireland building whose exterior gives little indication of the administrative and judicial weight this corner of the city once carried. John Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin, a remarkably detailed survey of the city at mid-eighteenth century, marks the Main Guard as a public building to the north of the western end of Hoey's Court, which helps to anchor the site even if the medieval gaol itself remains imprecisely located. Anyone curious about the earlier layers of Dublin's civic history would do well to have a copy of that map to hand when walking the area.