Not the lawn tennis of Victorian garden parties, but real tennis, the enclosed, indoor precursor to the modern game, played in a walled court with sloping roofs and irregular angles. It is the kind of sport that kings played, and the kind of detail that slips almost entirely out of the historical record.

The court stood at St John's Lane, at the upper end of Fishamble Street, one of Dublin's medieval thoroughfares. Records place it in existence before 1625, making it a rare trace of early modern recreational life in the city. It survived, remarkably, until 1972, when three of its four walls were demolished. The fourth wall, rather than being cleared away entirely, was incorporated into the boundary of the graveyard belonging to St. John's Church nearby. That survival was almost certainly practical rather than sentimental, the wall simply being too solid or too useful to remove. According to Somerville and Large, writing in 1996, the wall's repurposed function as a graveyard boundary is what preserved it into the present day.

Fishamble Street itself is well worth finding; it runs steeply down from Christchurch Cathedral toward the Liffey, and is probably best known as the street where Handel's Messiah received its world premiere in 1742. The remains of the tennis court are not signposted or celebrated, and there is no formal visitor access to the graveyard boundary in question, so what a curious visitor encounters is less a monument than a quiet piece of surviving fabric. The pleasure here is largely in knowing what you are looking at, a wall that once enclosed a game played in Dublin in the early seventeenth century, now doing the quieter work of marking out the dead.