The Church of St. John the Baptist, completed in 1734 and now sitting within the grounds of All Hallows College in Drumcondra, is the kind of building that repays close attention precisely because what you see is not what was always there. Beneath the present structure lies a sequence of earlier foundations that reach back well into the medieval period, each one replacing or absorbing the last.

The site was originally associated with the Priory of All Saints, a medieval religious house whose dissolution in the sixteenth century, like so many across Ireland and England under Henry VIII, left its buildings without a function. In the aftermath, a smaller church dedicated to St. Margaret was erected in its place, and this is almost certainly the building recorded simply as the 'small church' of Clonturk in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed Cromwellian-era land survey that provides one of the most useful snapshots of Irish landholding in the mid-seventeenth century. By 1734 the present church had replaced that earlier structure. Inside, a marble monument erected in 1740 commemorates Marmaduke Coghill, who built the nearby Drumcondra House. The monument is the work of Peter Scheemaker, a Flemish-born sculptor who was then one of the most sought-after monumental sculptors working in Britain and Ireland, known particularly for his classical figure work.

All Hallows College, founded in 1842 as a missionary seminary, now operates as part of Dublin City University, and the campus is generally accessible. The church sits within the college grounds rather than on a public street, so it is worth being aware that access may depend on the routines of the campus. The Scheemaker monument is the primary draw for anyone interested in eighteenth-century funerary sculpture, and it rewards a slower look than passing visitors typically give it. The surrounding grounds also retain traces of the longer institutional history of the site, though the medieval fabric itself has long since disappeared beneath successive rebuildings.