It is the kind of site that archaeologists note with a mixture of resignation and curiosity, a place whose existence is confirmed by historical record but whose physical fabric is now sealed under tarmac and foundations, inaccessible to excavation and to the eye alike.

The house at Ballygall first appears in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a remarkable document compiled in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest to establish land ownership across Ireland. That survey records a stone house on the townland of Ballygall, and by 1664 the building was occupied by a Mr. Dowling and a Hugh Broxton, a detail preserved in records cited by Cary in the early 1930s. Four chimneys would have marked this out as a structure of some substance for its period; in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland, multiple chimneystacks indicated a house of several heated rooms, suggesting a household of at least middling prosperity. The site is believed to correspond to a later property known as Ballygall House, though the precise architectural relationship between the earlier stone structure and whatever stood there subsequently remains unclear.

For anyone curious enough to go looking, the location falls within a residential area of north Dublin, and there is, practically speaking, nothing to see. The site was compiled as part of an archaeological record by Geraldine Stout and uploaded in 2011, which gives it a place in the national inventory even if it has no visible presence in the landscape. Its value now is almost entirely documentary: a name, two occupants, a count of chimneys, and the knowledge that somewhere underfoot, in a city that has expanded rapidly over its own past, a piece of early modern Dublin endures in the ground, unexamined.