At Westpalstown in north County Dublin, this tendency was documented in a rather specific way: in 1994, the ornamental gateway to Westpalstown house was found to incorporate a collection of carved stone pieces that almost certainly came from the medieval church recorded nearby.

The fragments noted at the time were not rough rubble but worked architectural elements, including chamfered window jambs, mullion fragments with glazing bars, and stone rebates. A chamfered jamb is the dressed, angled edge of a window or door opening; mullions are the vertical dividing bars within a window frame; and rebates are the stepped recesses cut into stone to receive a frame or glazing. Together, these details suggest windows of some refinement, likely from a late medieval or post-medieval phase of the nearby church, recorded in the archaeological record as DU007-008001-. How and when the stones migrated from the church to the gateway is not documented, but the practice of reusing dressed stonework from ruined ecclesiastical sites was widespread across Ireland from the seventeenth century onwards, as country house demesnes expanded and building material was expensive or simply convenient to source locally.

The record compiled by Geraldine Stout and updated by Christine Baker carries a significant qualifier: the fragments are noted as no longer located. Whatever gateway they once dressed, the stones had disappeared from their 1994 position by the time the entry was updated and uploaded in November 2014. There is no confirmed current whereabouts. For anyone researching the medieval church site at Westpalstown or the history of the house and its demesne, the 1994 observation remains a useful data point, evidence that dressed medieval stonework once survived in the area even if its present location is unknown. The absence itself is part of the record.