What those buildings looked like, who lived in them, and precisely where they stood are questions that cannot now be answered with any confidence.

The record of their existence comes from the Down Survey, a systematic cartographic undertaking carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest, the Down Survey was designed to measure and document forfeited Irish lands so they could be redistributed among soldiers and creditors of the parliamentary regime. The name derives not from County Down but from the practice of laying measurements "down" on paper. Petty's teams moved across the country barony by barony, and the resulting maps, for all their administrative coldness, accidentally preserved traces of a landscape that was being dramatically remade. The three dwellings at Kilmashogue appear on one of those maps, marked in the way surveyors of the period typically indicated inhabited structures. They date, on the basis of the map evidence alone, to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and nothing in the surviving record pins them more precisely to a date, an owner, or a family.

Kilmashogue today is perhaps best known for its woodland walks and the early medieval monuments that survive in the area, including a passage tomb on the ridge above. Anyone drawn to the site by curiosity about these lost houses should be aware that their location has not been precisely established by subsequent research, as compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy. There is no marker, no ruin to inspect, no field boundary that can be pointed to with certainty. What the area does offer is a layered kind of attention, the sense of walking through a place that was lived in across many centuries, even when the specific evidence has grown faint. The Kilmashogue lane approach from the Ballyboden side gives good access to the lower ground where such domestic settlement would most plausibly have sat, sheltered from the prevailing weather and close to water.