Yet that is precisely what survives in the paper record associated with a small house site on the Loop Head peninsula in County Clare, where the terms of a ninety-nine-year tenancy laid out, in careful detail, a stone building with chimneys, one and a half storeys high, forty feet by eighteen feet, floored with boards and roofed with slate or shingles. The improvements carried out under those terms were said to have cost £600, a substantial sum in the seventeenth century.

The story behind the site moves through several of the most turbulent episodes in early modern Irish history. In 1620 the lands at Querrin were included in the Earl of Thomond's patent, placing them within the network of landed interests controlled by that powerful Clare family. Then came the Cromwellian Settlement of the 1650s, which displaced many existing occupants and introduced new ones; a man named Isaack Vanhogarden was installed here during that period. After the Restoration of the monarchy, the Earl of Thomond regained control and leased the lands to John Wright and Humphrey Rogers on those precisely worded building terms. By 1681, the traveller Thomas Dineley was passing through and noted what he found: a 'neat box belonging to Mr Abraham Vanhogarden, who built it.' The Vanhogarden name, Dutch in origin, appearing twice across the decades, hints at the complicated mobility of people and fortunes in this part of Clare during that era. The house standing at Querrin today dates from the eighteenth century, though it is possible that some of the earlier fabric was incorporated into the later structure, the bones of one building quietly surviving inside another.