This kind of architectural layering is more common than it might seem in Irish urban history, but the particular circumstances here connect the site to one of the more influential aristocratic landholdings in early modern County Dublin.

At the opening of the eighteenth century, the lands now known as Mount Jerome were the property of the Earl of Meath, one of the great Anglo-Irish peerage titles whose holders controlled substantial tracts of land across Leinster for several centuries. A considerable house stood on these grounds and was recorded as occupied in 1706, a detail noted by the historian F. E. Ball in his 1906 survey of the County Dublin parishes. Rather than being cleared away as tastes and ownership changed over the following decades, the structure was incorporated into whatever dwelling eventually took shape on the site, meaning the walls and possibly other elements of that early eighteenth-century building became part of something newer. It is the kind of survival that rarely announces itself.

Mount Jerome is best known today as a cemetery, opened in the 1830s and still functioning, so visitors to the area are more likely to encounter that landscape of Victorian funerary architecture than any trace of the earlier house. The connection between the early dwelling and the later cemetery grounds is not always made explicit in popular accounts of the area. Anyone with a serious interest in the building's earlier incarnation would do well to consult Ball's work directly, as the notes available on the site itself are thin. Harold's Cross is accessible by bus from the city centre, and the broader area rewards an unhurried look for those interested in how older Dublin absorbed and transformed its own earlier built environment.