That much is known. Beyond those compass bearings, almost nothing survives, and the structures themselves have long since vanished, leaving only a line or two in a seventeenth-century survey to mark their existence.

The source is the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, one of the great documentary efforts of the Cromwellian administration in Ireland, compiled to assess land ownership and value in the aftermath of conquest. It was an exercise in accounting, not preservation, and yet it inadvertently recorded the texture of ordinary rural life in ways that later sources often do not. The entry noted by historian Geraldine Stout, drawing on Robert Simington's 1945 edition of the survey, describes two thatched houses in the townland of Raheny, Co. Dublin. Thatch was the default roofing material for vernacular buildings of this period across Ireland, used on everything from labourers' cottages to more substantial farmhouses, and its presence here tells us little about the status of whoever lived in these structures. The Civil Survey was compiled at a moment when the landscape of the area was being reorganised and redistributed, so whatever continuity these buildings represented was likely severed shortly afterwards.

There is, in truth, nothing to visit. The exact location of these houses is unknown, and no physical trace has been identified on the ground. What remains is the record itself, accessible through Simington's published edition of the Civil Survey and through the database entry compiled by Stout in 2011. For anyone walking the area around Raheny church or following the course of the Santry river northward, the survey entry is a reminder that the ground underfoot was once divided differently, occupied differently, and described in careful administrative prose by surveyors working for a government that had only just seized control of it.