Somewhere in County Kildare, there is a town that exists entirely on paper. It had a sovereign, twelve burgesses, one hundred acres, and the right to return two members to parliament. It had a charter, a manor, and a name. What it never quite had was a future, and today not a single visible trace of it remains on the ground.

In 1681, Maurice Eustace obtained a charter from Charles II formally erecting his lands into the manor of Harristown and incorporating the borough and town of the same name. The arrangement was a recognisable feature of late seventeenth-century Irish land politics: a landowner secures royal sanction, lays out the administrative apparatus of a functioning settlement, and anchors it to whatever was already there. In Harristown's case, that meant proximity to an existing tower house, a fortified residence of the kind common across medieval Ireland, and a church, with the borough possibly also overlying or adjoining an earlier motte, an earthen mound of Norman origin used as a defensive platform. The new borough was to have its own sovereign and twelve burgesses, the basic civic structure of an incorporated Irish town of the period, and was granted parliamentary representation. It did not last. The Williamite confiscations that followed the Williamite War of the early 1690s swept away the political and property arrangements on which many such ventures depended, and Harristown went with them. The borough that Maurice Eustace had so carefully chartered simply ceased to function, and whatever physical presence it had accumulated was either absorbed, abandoned, or erased over the generations that followed.