That much is certain. Where exactly it stood, nobody can now say, and that small fact places it in an oddly compelling category of historical record: the monument whose existence is documented but whose location has been entirely lost to time.

The evidence for this dwelling comes from the Down Survey, a remarkable mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to map confiscated Irish land. Carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty, it remains one of the earliest and most detailed surveys of Irish territory, and its maps preserve traces of settlements, boundaries, and land use that would otherwise have vanished without record. In the townland of Banshee, the survey marks a dwelling, placing a structure of probable sixteenth or seventeenth-century origin somewhere in this corner of Dublin. Beyond that single notation on a period map, nothing further is known. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout, and the entry is frank about what it cannot tell us: the exact location of this monument is unknown.

There is something instructive about a site like this one. Banshee is a real townland, and it can be found, but visiting with any expectation of seeing a ruin or a visible trace of the old house would be misplaced. What survives is not a structure but an absence, a gap in the landscape that a seventeenth-century cartographer happened to notice and mark before it disappeared entirely. For anyone interested in the Down Survey itself, digitised versions of the original maps are accessible online through the Irish Manuscripts Commission and related archives, and comparing the survey's depiction of a given area against modern mapping can be a quietly absorbing exercise. In this case, that comparison yields a dwelling that exists only as ink on a historical map, somewhere in the Dublin countryside, its walls long gone and its ground unmarked.