It is a modest annotation, easy to overlook among the dense geometry of streets and plots, yet it marks something worth pausing over: a purpose-built leisure space from the early eighteenth century, long since absorbed into the city's fabric and largely forgotten by the people who walk past its former footprint every day.

The green lay to the rear of a house built in 1710 by Sir Joshua Dawson, the property developer and alderman whose name survives in the street that runs alongside it. Dawson Street itself was one of the more fashionable addresses of its era, part of a newly laid-out neighbourhood that was drawing Dublin's prosperous classes northward from the older medieval core. The bowling green served that same population, offering space for promenading and what contemporaries called disporting, a broad term for the kind of genteel outdoor recreation that marked one's distance from labour. As Lennon and Montague noted in their 2010 study of the area, its very presence on Rocque's map speaks to the upmarket and settled character of the district at mid-century.

There is nothing physically to see today; the green was a landscape feature rather than a built structure, and it left no visible trace above ground. Its interest lies entirely in the cartographic record and in what that record implies about how this part of Dublin was conceived and used by its earliest residents. Rocque's 1756 map is widely available in reproduction and online through the Dublin City Library and Archive, and tracing the outline of the original Dawson estate on it, set against a modern street map of the same area, gives a surprisingly clear sense of how much, and how little, the urban grain has shifted in three centuries.