The word "may" is doing considerable work here, because this is a place that exists almost entirely as a mark on an old map, its precise location unknown and its physical remains, if any survive, unconfirmed.

The evidence comes from the Down Survey, a remarkable cartographic project carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, the survey was intended to map forfeited lands so they could be redistributed to soldiers and creditors. It remains one of the most ambitious mapping exercises of seventeenth-century Europe, and it recorded, in considerable detail, the buildings and features of the Irish landscape as they appeared at that moment. On the Down Survey map covering this part of Dublin, two features are marked at Dolphin's Barn: a church and a gabled dwelling. That is essentially the entirety of what is known. The map does not pin the church to a specific plot, and no further documentation appears to confirm whether the building was already ruinous by that point, still in use, or something in between.

Dolphin's Barn today is a dense, largely residential neighbourhood, threaded through with streets that follow routes far older than the houses that now line them. There is nothing obviously ecclesiastical to seek out, no ruin, no outline of a foundation visible in a field, and no heritage marker pointing to the spot. The value here is less in what can be seen and more in the act of reading the landscape with this gap in mind. Anyone with an interest in historical mapping might find it worthwhile to compare Petty's original Down Survey maps, which are accessible through the Trinity College Dublin digital collections, against a modern street map of the area. The neighbourhood's name itself is old, and the presence of both a church and a dwelling on a mid-seventeenth-century survey suggests that Dolphin's Barn was already a recognisable local node well before Dublin's expansion drew it into the city proper.