The structure once stood at the foot of a street known in the twelfth century as MacGilla Mogholmóc's Street, a name that now survives, in much simplified form, as St. Michael's Close. What is remarkable is not any surviving stonework, since little or nothing of the gate remains visible today, but rather the documentary trace it has left: a reference in a twelfth-century deed that confirms a formal, gated threshold existed here at the very moment the city was consolidating its medieval identity.

The deed in question was drawn to the attention of later scholars through John T. Gilbert's monumental compilation of Dublin records, published between 1854 and 1859, and subsequently noted by Bradley and King in their survey of Irish walled towns. A gateway in a medieval urban context typically formed part of a defensive or administrative boundary, controlling movement into a particular quarter, parish, or enclosed precinct, sometimes associated with a church or religious house. St. Michael's Church stood nearby, and the street name itself, honouring a figure whose Gaelic name translates loosely as "servant of Molmóg," hints at the layered linguistic and ecclesiastical world of early medieval Dublin, where Hiberno-Norse, Gaelic, and later Anglo-Norman influences were constantly overlapping.

For a visitor, this is very much a site of the historical imagination rather than of dramatic physical remains. St. Michael's Close lies in the Liberties area of Dublin's south city, a district with its own long and complicated history of industry, poverty, and civic life. Walking the close today, the streetscape is modest and largely modern in character. There is nothing to mark the spot where the gate once stood, and no signage draws attention to the twelfth-century deed that preserves its memory. Those with an interest in medieval Dublin's vanished topography may find the exercise quietly satisfying nonetheless, reading the curve of a lane or the alignment of a boundary as the ghost of something much older.