It was found during excavations in 1971, noted in a National Museum of Ireland file, and then, in a sense, lost again. Not demolished, not destroyed, simply unplaced. The record exists; the wall does not, for any practical purpose, have a fixed address.

The wall in question was identified as belonging to the precinct of St. Mary's Abbey, once the largest and wealthiest Cistercian monastery in medieval Ireland. The Cistercians were a reform-minded monastic order who established St. Mary's on the north bank of the Liffey in the twelfth century, and over the following centuries the abbey accumulated enormous landholdings across the city and beyond. A precinct wall would have marked the outer boundary of the monastic enclosure, the physical and legal edge of the abbey's domestic world. When excavations were carried out in 1971 in the area west of Liffey Street, backing onto what was then Jervis Street hospital, a section of walling was recorded under the National Museum file reference NMI 1971:1063, assigned to the site record DU018-048. The note was compiled by Geraldine Stout and entered into the archaeological record in 2012. It confirms the find but not the precise coordinates. The exact location of this precinct wall is not known.

The area today gives little outward sign of its medieval depth. Jervis Street, now better known for its shopping centre than its hospital, sits in a part of the city that has been built over, dug up, and rebuilt repeatedly. Anyone curious about St. Mary's Abbey itself can visit the surviving chapter house, the room where monks gathered daily for communal readings, which is preserved off Meetinghouse Lane near Capel Street and is maintained by the Office of Public Works. It opens to visitors on a limited seasonal basis. The 1971 wall, however, remains a ghost in the record, somewhere underfoot between two busy streets, its position approximate, its survival unknown.