It is the kind of detail that survives in the historical record precisely because it was so sudden and so final, a domestic catastrophe attached to a place that has otherwise left very little trace. Buzzardstown House, to the north-west of Dublin, is in many ways a site defined by absence: the house is gone, the family that owned it is gone, and when archaeologists eventually went looking for physical evidence of the earlier structure, they found nothing at all.

The story of the site stretches back further than the Floods. The Down Survey, a mapping project carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty to record land ownership following the Cromwellian conquest, shows a dwelling at Buzzardstown in that period, suggesting occupation here through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Flood family had taken ownership of the house, and it is through them that the site enters the documentary record in any human detail. The circumstances of 1761 are recorded with the blunt economy typical of contemporary accounts: the gable gave way, two people died, and that is very nearly all we know.

Test excavation was carried out at the site under licence number 06E0184, but no archaeological remains were located, which places Buzzardstown in a category of sites where the historical record outpaces the physical one. Buzzardstown itself is a townland in the Mulhuddart area of County Dublin, now substantially absorbed into the wider suburban spread north-west of the city. For anyone with an interest in the early modern landscape of the Dublin hinterland, the Down Survey maps are freely available online through Trinity College Dublin and offer a way of placing sites like this within the broader pattern of landholding and settlement that Petty's surveyors recorded in the 1650s. The ground itself, in this case, offers nothing further.