Nobody today can say exactly where. Its precise location has never been identified, which places it in a curious category of historical structures: documented but lost, recorded in ink yet vanished from the landscape without leaving a traceable mark.

What we do know comes from the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a wide-ranging assessment of land ownership and property carried out in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. The survey was a systematic attempt to catalogue what existed on Irish land, often as a prelude to redistribution. For Garristown, the surveyors noted that on the lands of one William Talbot of Robertstown, County Meath, described in the record as an Irish Papist, there stood a chaff house, a barn, a kill house, and a garden plot. The kill house, or kiln house, would have been a structure for drying grain, a common feature of agricultural estates in this period. The whole lot was valued by the jury at three pounds. Talbot, as a Catholic landowner at a moment when Catholic land tenure in Ireland was under severe pressure, would almost certainly have faced the prospect of dispossession. The survey itself was part of the machinery that made such dispossession possible.

For anyone curious enough to visit Garristown, the village sits in north County Dublin, not far from the border with Meath. There is nothing on the ground to mark where Talbot's farm buildings stood, and no reasonable prospect of finding them without further archaeological investigation. What the place offers instead is the particular atmosphere of a landscape that holds its history quietly, without signposting it. The Civil Survey record, published in Robert Simington's 1945 edition, remains the only firm evidence that these structures existed at all, a single line of seventeenth-century administrative prose preserving the outline of a farm that has otherwise entirely disappeared.