At Newross in County Tipperary, there is a site where an old house once stood, now so thoroughly replaced that not a single surface trace of any pre-1700 structure remains. What makes it quietly curious is that the absence itself is documented, preserved in the written record even as the physical evidence vanished entirely beneath later building work.

When John O'Donovan and his colleagues were travelling the country in 1840 compiling the Ordnance Survey field name books, a meticulous project to record local place names, landscape features, and points of interest, they noted this location as "New Ross Old house." By that point, the original structure had already been swept away and replaced by a farmhouse and associated offices built directly on the same ground. The name survived the building; the building did not. No date has ever been firmly established for the earlier house, which is why it sits in the record with the quietly unsatisfying label of indeterminate date, a placeholder for something that once mattered enough to name but not enough, apparently, to preserve.