The cross is the cartographer's conventional symbol for a place of worship, and the building it identifies, a Roman Catholic chapel, went by a name that reflected its address rather than any sense of civic dignity: Dirty Lane Chapel. The street it faced onto is now called Bridgefoot Street, and the chapel itself has long since vanished, replaced and eventually forgotten. That a functioning Catholic parish church once operated here at all, in a lane off a lane, says something quietly significant about the conditions under which Catholic worship was conducted in post-Reformation Dublin.

The chapel's origins stretch back to the reign of Charles II, when it was first erected in Mass Lane, a name that makes its purpose plain. At that point it served two neighbouring parishes together, St James's and St Catherine's, but in 1724 the two were formally separated and the chapel was assigned exclusively to the parishioners of St Catherine's. The first parish priest in that separate existence was the Reverend Valentine Rivers, who held the post until 1744 and during his tenure substantially enlarged and reconstructed the building. It was his renovation work, and the fact that one of the chapel's walls faced onto Dirty Lane, that gave the place its informal name. A description recorded in 1749 paints a surprisingly tidy interior for such an unprepossessing address: it is called a convenient building with a handsome altar well decorated, the altarpiece depicting Our Saviour bearing the Cross. By 1780 a site for a replacement chapel had been secured, and in 1782 a new building opened on the east side of Meath Street, to the rear of existing houses and opposite Hanbury Lane. The old chapel, by then described as much decayed, was left behind.

Nothing of the physical chapel survives today. The site falls within the area around Bridgefoot Street and the southern end of what was once Mass Lane, a part of the Liberties that has been heavily redeveloped over the centuries. The value of the site now lies entirely in the documentary and cartographic record. Rocque's 1756 map, widely available in reproduced and digitised form, remains the clearest evidence of the chapel's precise location and orientation. Those interested in the history of Catholic Dublin under the Penal Laws, or in the urban fabric of the eighteenth-century city, will find the surviving written sources, particularly Donnelly's 1904 compilation of contemporary chapel descriptions, more rewarding than any visit to the street corner itself.