This one survives only as a sentence. Somewhere in the area now known as Clonturk, in north County Dublin, there was once a gatehouse attached to a castle, and we know this only because a surveyor wrote it down in the 1650s. Beyond that single reference, nothing is confirmed, and the exact location of the structure has never been established.

The source is the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, an ambitious project carried out under Cromwellian administration to document landholding across Ireland following the upheavals of the 1641 rebellion and the subsequent Cromwellian conquest. The survey recorded not just ownership and acreage but incidental details of buildings and features on the land, which is why a gatehouse in a place called Drum Conragh made it into the record at all. The entry, noted by Robert Simington in his 1945 edition of the survey, places the gatehouse in association with a castle at Drum Conragh, the earlier placename for the area. A gatehouse in this context would typically have been a defended or semi-defended entrance structure, controlling access to a castle enclosure or bawn, the latter being the walled courtyard that commonly surrounded tower houses and fortified residences in late medieval Ireland. Whether any trace of the associated castle or its gatehouse remained standing at the time of the survey, or whether the surveyors were simply recording a known former presence, the document does not say.

Clonturk today is absorbed into the dense suburban fabric of Drumcondra and the northside of Dublin city, and there is no visible monument to seek out. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland database in September 2011, which is where the trail, such as it is, currently ends. For anyone with an interest in the archaeology of the medieval Dublin hinterland, the entry is a reminder of how much has been built over, lost, or simply never found, and of how much historical weight can rest on a single line of a seventeenth-century land survey.