It is not the most obvious use for a piece of defensive architecture, but St. Audeon's Gate, tucked into St. Audeon's Park off Cook Street on the south side of Dublin city, has accumulated a quietly eccentric history beneath its crenellated top. By 1863, the Ordnance Survey was labelling it simply 'St. Audoen's Arch', which gives some sense of how thoroughly its original military purpose had been forgotten.

The gate was first mentioned in records in 1240, and at some point afterwards it acquired the secondary name 'the Watergate'. In 1602 it was leased to the Master of the tanners, a trade guild who continued using it as a meeting place until roughly the mid-eighteenth century. What they occupied, however, was already a reduced version of the original structure; the gate had formerly been a proper gatehouse with a tower rising above the passage. What survives today is the product of heavy restoration: a gateway with shallow side towers, their crenellations, the stepped battlements along the top, brought down to sit flush with the level of the adjacent town wall. The opening measures roughly 4.6 metres wide and just over 4 metres high. Three external buttresses appear to be later additions rather than original fabric, though early masonry is still visible in the external face. A projecting tower at the western end carries a mock Gothic door, a nineteenth-century flourish that sits a little incongruously against the medieval stonework around it. Sections of the old town wall extend to both the east and west of the gate.

The gate sits within St. Audeon's Park, a small public green that is generally accessible during daylight hours. Cook Street runs along the base of the old city wall here, and approaching from that direction gives the clearest sense of the gate's relationship to the surviving wall fabric on either side. The mock Gothic door on the western tower is easy to miss if you are focused on the arch itself, so it is worth circling around once you arrive. The area is compact and the park itself modest in scale, but the proximity of the surviving wall sections to the gate makes it possible to read something of the original defensive circuit, even in its much-altered state.