On the north side of Dublin city, a stretch of defensive or reclamation walling once defined the boundary between land and water, yet today the shoreline has moved so far outward through centuries of reclamation that the original wall has been absorbed almost entirely into the urban fabric, its purpose dissolved long before most of the buildings around it were raised.

The wall appears on two significant early maps of Dublin. Bernard De Gomme's survey of 1673 and Charles Brooking's map of 1728 both record its presence, offering a rare pair of fixed points from which its location and extent can be traced. De Gomme, a military engineer who served Charles II, was principally concerned with the city's fortifications and its relationship to the sea, which makes his inclusion of this wall particularly useful as evidence. Brooking's slightly later map, produced in a more commercial spirit as a detailed civic survey, confirms that the structure was still a recognised feature of the north city's geography into the early eighteenth century. John De Courcy, writing in his 1996 study of the Liffey, draws on both sources when noting the wall, placing it within the broader history of Dublin's shifting, contested waterfront.

Because so much of this area has been built over and reconfigured since the seventeenth century, there is no obvious physical remains to seek out in the way one might visit a ruined tower or an earthwork. The value here is archival as much as it is physical. Visitors with an interest in historical cartography would do well to consult reproductions of the De Gomme and Brooking maps, both of which are held in various archival collections and have been widely reproduced in works on Dublin's urban history. Overlaying those early maps against a modern street plan of the north city reveals how dramatically the relationship between the built environment and the Liffey estuary has changed, and where, beneath the streets and infill, something of that older boundary might still theoretically survive.