Standing on the south side of Dublin city, it sat directly beside the former site of a Knights Templar priory, meaning that for however long it occupied that plot, its residents were living in the shadow of one of medieval Ireland's most significant religious and military orders.

According to the architectural historian Walsh, writing in 1973, the cottage is thought to have been built in the 1680s, placing its construction in the decades following the Cromwellian upheaval and the gradual reshaping of Dublin's urban fabric. The external stair, a feature occasionally seen in vernacular buildings of the period and used to provide access to an upper storey without sacrificing interior space to a stairwell, gives a sense of how practically these structures were arranged. The priory it adjoined had far older origins. Founded in 1174, it was one of the early establishments of the Knights Templar in Ireland, an order of crusading monks who combined religious life with military function and who accumulated considerable landholdings across Europe before their suppression in the early fourteenth century. By the time the cottage was built, the priory itself had long since disappeared from active use, but its footprint evidently remained legible in the landscape.

The cottage itself no longer exists, having been demolished in 1897, and no physical trace is recorded as surviving above ground. What remains is the documentary record, preserved in Walsh's 1973 study, which includes a figure illustrating the building's form. For anyone researching the layered urban archaeology of Dublin's south city, this site represents the kind of gap in the streetscape that repays careful attention: a plot where a seventeenth-century domestic building once stood over ground that had been in continuous significant use since at least the twelfth century.