On a mid-seventeenth-century map of this part of County Dublin, a small mark indicates a house at Terenure, accompanied by a note in the parish map terrier, the written record that accompanies survey maps, describing it as a dwelling house formerly a mill. That combination, a working mill converted into domestic accommodation, was not unusual in itself for the period, but this particular building has never been pinned to a specific location on the ground.

The source is the Down Survey, carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty as part of the Cromwellian land settlement in Ireland. It was one of the most ambitious mapping exercises attempted in Europe at the time, designed to record landholdings in sufficient detail to redistribute forfeited Catholic estates. The parish map terrier entry uses the older spelling of the placename, recording the location as Tirenure, and notes simply that the structure had at some point transitioned from mill to house. Whether it was a corn mill, a tucking mill for processing cloth, or something else entirely, the record does not say. Nor does it give an owner, a tenant, or any indication of how long the conversion had been in place by the time the surveyors passed through.

Because the building has not been precisely located by subsequent research, there is no specific site to visit, no wall to seek out, no earthwork or foundation to examine in a field. What does survive is the documentary trace itself, accessible through the Down Survey project, which has digitised the maps and accompanying records and made them freely available online. For anyone with an interest in the early modern landscape of south Dublin, searching the survey for Terenure gives a glimpse of how thoroughly the parish was documented, even when the physical evidence on the ground has long since disappeared. The gap between the written record and any recoverable physical remains is, in its own way, part of what the survey tells us about how much has changed in the centuries since Petty's teams moved through the Irish countryside with their chains and notebooks.