A bawn, to give the term its due, was a fortified enclosure wall, typically of stone, built to protect a lord's house and outbuildings from cattle raids and armed attack. In Killester, no trace of one is visible today, and its precise position is unknown. What survives instead is a single entry in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which records, with the slightly breathless formality of a legal valuation, 'One faire stone house slated wth. severall houses of Office and a stone Bawne valued by ye Jury at three hundred pounds,' all listed among the premises of the Lord Baron of Howth.

The property was known as 'Quillestra', and according to Bowen, writing in 1963, it had been in the hands of the St. Lawrence family of Howth since the late fourteenth century. The St. Lawrences were the Barons of Howth, a title and estate they held with remarkable continuity across the medieval and early modern periods. A specific moment survives in the record: around 1492, Nicholas St. Lawrence entertained Sir James Butler at Killester, a detail that places the house firmly within the social and political networks of late medieval Leinster. The 'faire stone house' of the Civil Survey may have occupied the same ground, or ground very close to it, as a later structure called Killester House, described by Bence-Jones as a single-storey, eighteenth-century house that stood near Killester Village before being demolished in the early twentieth century. Whether the medieval fabric survived into that later building, or was cleared long before it, is not recorded.

Today, the area around Killester Village is covered by residential housing estates, and there is nothing to see on the ground. The site carries a record in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, but no physical remains have been identified or confirmed. For anyone curious enough to look, the modern village centre gives a rough geographical orientation, though the exact plot where the bawn once stood remains unlocated. This is, in the end, a place defined less by what can be found than by what the documentary record quietly insists was once there.