Dolphins Barn, now a dense residential district on the south side of the city, almost certainly takes its identity from a drinking establishment recorded as Dolphin's barn as far back as 1396, making it one of the more quietly persistent pub names in Irish urban history.

According to Jonathan Bardon's 1988 research, the place-name derives from that medieval tavern, the earliest known reference dating to 1396. The barn element was a common attachment to inn and tavern names in medieval Ireland and Britain, sometimes indicating a building used for storage alongside hospitality, though the exact character of Dolphin's barn is not recorded in the surviving notes. What is striking is that a single commercial premises, likely unremarkable in its own time, should lend its name so durably to a whole area of a capital city. The dolphin itself, as a heraldic and decorative symbol, was reasonably common in medieval signage and personal heraldry, so the original proprietor may simply have hung a painted board featuring the creature above the door.

There is, of course, nothing to visit in the conventional sense. The tavern is long gone, and no physical remains are associated with it. The neighbourhood itself, accessible via the South Circular Road and well served by Dublin Bus routes, is an ordinary working city district. What a curious visitor can do is simply stand in it and consider that the entire topographical identity of this part of Dublin, every street sign and postal address, descends from a single building that someone walked into for a drink more than six hundred years ago.