A dwelling recorded in the townland of Balheary, in north County Dublin, is one such place. It survives only as a reference, noted without coordinates, without a name attached to any owner, and without a physical trace that has since been confirmed on the ground.

The evidence comes from two of the most significant land surveys carried out in seventeenth-century Ireland. The Down Survey, conducted in the 1650s under the direction of Sir William Petty, and the Civil Survey of roughly the same period, were both produced in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest, primarily as instruments for redistributing land confiscated from Catholic landowners. Together they documented properties, buildings, and land quality across the country in considerable detail, which makes it all the more striking when a reference within them cannot be pinned to a precise location. The Balheary dwelling is described as a house of sixteenth or seventeenth century date, but beyond its appearance in those survey records, compiled and noted by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the record in August 2011, little else can be said with confidence.

Balheary lies in the Swords area of Fingal, a district with its own layered archaeological landscape, and the townland itself is not especially large. A visitor curious enough to go looking would find a quiet rural and suburban fringe north of Swords, but there is no structure to seek out, no ruin visible in a field corner. The interest here is of a different kind, less about what can be seen and more about what the absence of evidence suggests: that ordinary domestic buildings of this period, not castles or churches but simply houses where people lived, disappeared so completely that even careful historical surveys can only gesture toward where they once stood.