Tanning was a malodorous but essential urban industry, using pits filled with bark-derived tannin to cure animal hides into leather. What makes this particular site unusual is the precision with which it has been documented across time, from a seventeenth-century survey taken in the immediate aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, through cathedral chapter records, Victorian valuation maps, and finally a set of archaeological test trenches opened in 2020.

The Cromwellian Civil Survey of 1654 describes the property in remarkable detail. At that point it was occupied by a John Murphy and sat to the rear of the Chancellor's Manse, the residence associated with the chancellorship of St. Canice's Cathedral. The survey records a stone-walled, slate-roofed tan house measuring roughly 18.9 metres by 6 metres, containing twenty-four tanning vats and a mill for grinding bark, along with a separate yard holding a further six vats, a dwelling house, and an orchard. Half a century later, in 1703, the chapter book of St. Canice's Cathedral recorded a lease of the same property, made the previous September by the cathedral's chancellor to a Reverend James Tovey, and described its boundaries in careful detail: running from the king's highway at Troy's Gate in the west to the River Nore in the east, and bordered to the north and south by the lands of neighbouring vicars choral and the city wall. By 1850, Griffith's Valuation listed the "Offices and tan yard" as occupied by a Richard Sullivan, with a Joseph Loughnane as lessor, and the operation was still prominent enough to appear on the 1872 Ordnance Survey map. Somewhere around 1865, it closed for good.

The 2020 excavations found five of the six pits lined with compact yellow marl clay, and one lined with timber. The ground beneath them had been built up artificially, and sherds of Kilkenny-type pottery recovered from the underlying reclamation deposit date to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, suggesting the area had been prepared for occupation well before the tannery took its documented form. The tops of the pits had been sheared off during groundwork carried out for Smithwick's Brewery in the late 1980s or early 1990s, but the pits themselves remain in situ below the present surface, a quiet industrial record preserved in the subsoil of a city that has been processing hides, grinding bark, and leasing orchards along this stretch of the Nore for longer than any single document can say.