handball alley

Ball court, built 1775, on an irregular rectangular plan with rubble limestone boundary wall to perimeter having rendered rounded coping.

A ball court surviving as an interesting relic of the Four Courts Marshalsea (1775; closed 1874; demolished 1975) described (1831) as '[a] building...180 feet by 120 divided into two court-yards [with] the house of the Marshal, apartments for his deputy...[a] guard-room, common hall...a chapel, infirmary, ball-court, common bath, and various necessary offices' (Hardy 1831, 158-9). A file of papers in the National Archives of Ireland includes a statement (26th August 1819) from 'the gentlemen confined in the Four Courts Marshalsea' requesting repairs to the ball court as 'it gives the only Exercise and amusement the Debtors of [the] prison can enjoy' (NAI/CSO/RP/1819/12). The ball court originally had just one play area and it is likely that two additional play areas were provided when the vacant Four Courts Marshalsea was taken over by Dublin City Council in 1922 and repurposed as a tenement. The perimeter wall, partly inaccessible owing to construction, may include a benchmark ("B.M. 39.8") or a War Department Boundary Stone ("B.S. W?D No. 5") from the period when the Four Courts Marshalsea was repurposed as a barracks.