Ballynahalisk, in County Cork, is one of those places that sits at the edge of the record, a house whose name survives in townland form without the detailed chronicle of ownership, construction, or decline that would ordinarily give it shape and substance. The townland name itself, Baile na hAilisce in Irish, suggests a settlement of some antiquity, though what the present or former house looked like, who built it, or what became of it remains, for now, unrecovered.