The area around Killester Village was once the site of a complex known as Quillestra, complete with a slated stone house, ancillary outbuildings, and a bawn, which is an enclosed defensive courtyard typically built of stone and associated with fortified tower houses and manor complexes of the period. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 recorded it as belonging to the Lord Baron of Hoath and valued the entire ensemble at three hundred pounds, a considerable sum that suggests a substantial and well-maintained property.

According to Bowen, writing in 1963, Quillestra had been in the hands of the St. Lawrence family of Howth since the late fourteenth century. The name itself is an anglicisation of the Irish place name for Killester. Around 1492, Nicholas St. Lawrence was recorded as having entertained Sir James Butler at the property, a detail that places the house within the social and political networks of the Pale at a particularly turbulent moment in Anglo-Irish relations. By the time of the Civil Survey, the estate had passed to the Lord Baron of Howth, but the family connection remained, the St. Lawrences of Howth being one of the longer-established Norman dynasties on the Dublin coast. A later structure, referred to as Killester House, a single-storey eighteenth-century house, stood close to the original site before being demolished in the early twentieth century, and it is possible that this later building occupied ground once held by the medieval complex.

There is, in practical terms, very little for a visitor to see. The precise location of the house, outbuildings, and bawn has not been established, and the surrounding area is now covered by residential development. What makes the site worth knowing about is exactly that absence: a documented medieval manor, visited by notable figures and valued at a significant sum in the mid-seventeenth century, has been entirely absorbed into the suburban fabric of the city. Walking through Killester today, the ordinariness of the streetscape is itself the point. The archaeology, if any survives, lies somewhere underfoot, unexcavated and unannounced.