The Old Norse word haugar referred to such a mound, and it was one of these, standing just outside the boundary wall of a medieval convent, that gave a name to the whole district: Hoggen Green, which became College Green, and the street now known as St Andrew's Street, which appeared on Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin simply as Hog Hill. The convent in question was St Mary de Hogges, an abbey of Arroasian nuns, a reform movement within the Augustinian tradition that spread across Ireland in the twelfth century, and the ground beneath this busy part of the city was once entirely theirs.

The abbey was founded around 1146 by Diarmait Mac Murchada, King of Leinster, and was attached to the principal Arroasian house at Clonard in County Meath. According to historian Howard Clarke, it was Ragnall mac Torcaill who established the community of nuns beside a former Viking assembly place and the burial ground of pagan rulers, and the name de Hogges derived from that burial mound still visible outside the nuns' wall at the time. The convent was apparently rebuilt during the reign of King John, and by 1536 it comprised a church with a bell tower, a dormitory, a chapter house, further buildings, and a two-acre walled pasture. Its landholding was considerable, stretching, according to one account, from College Green to Merrion Square and from the north side of St Stephen's Green to Nassau Street. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the church and its buildings were demolished on the orders of William Brabazon, under-treasurer of Ireland, and the salvaged materials were carted off to repair Dublin Castle. By 1550 the site had been granted to a Richard Fyant and associates, with the intention of setting up six looms for linen and woollen yarn, employing weavers and spinners who might otherwise have no work.

Nothing above ground survives from the convent itself. The deconsecrated Church of Ireland St Andrew's Church on Suffolk Street, a nineteenth-century building now used as a tourist office, stands partly on the site of an earlier seventeenth-century church and graveyard, which in turn occupied part of the former nunnery ground. The 1892 Ordnance Survey map of Dublin city annotates the location explicitly as the site of the Nunnery of St Mary de Hogges. For anyone curious to orient themselves, that map is available digitally through UCD Library. The physical trace is gone, but standing on the corner of Suffolk Street and St Andrew's Street, it is worth knowing that the street name underneath your feet once pointed, however distantly, to a Norse grave mound and the women who lived beside it.