That silence is itself a kind of presence. Rural Cork was once well supplied with the seats of landed families, many of them built or remodelled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a considerable number did not outlast the upheavals of the early twentieth century. Some were burned, some abandoned, some simply allowed to decline until the walls gave way. A house reduced to a name on a map carries the outline of a life that was once organised around it, even when the details have gone.