We know this much from a single passing reference in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a sweeping Cromwellian-era audit of land ownership and built structures across Ireland, compiled in the aftermath of conquest and confiscation. Beyond that brief notation, recorded by the scholar R.C. Simington in his 1945 edition of the survey, virtually nothing is certain, including where exactly the building was.

The Civil Survey was one of the most ambitious administrative exercises of seventeenth-century Ireland, intended to document who owned what and what stood on the land, partly to facilitate the redistribution of territory to Cromwellian settlers and soldiers. A stone house, in this context, was worth noting; many structures of the period were built in timber or other perishable materials, and a house of stone implied some degree of permanence, resources, and status. Whether it belonged to a Gaelic Irish family, an Old English landowner, or a more recent planter is not recorded. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of profound disruption in this part of Leinster, and Clonturk, now absorbed into the suburban fabric of Drumcondra and Glasnevin, would have been agricultural land on the edge of a much smaller Dublin. The monument record, compiled by Geraldine Stout and uploaded in September 2011, is candid about the limits of what survives: the exact location of this monument is unknown.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to visit. The site has no confirmed coordinates, no visible remains, and no marker. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that absence, and what it illustrates about the fragility of the archaeological record in an area that has been so thoroughly built over. If you happen to be walking through Clonturk Park or along the streets between Drumcondra and Glasnevin, you are moving through a landscape that almost certainly covers traces of earlier occupation, most of it unrecoverable. The stone house is a useful reminder that the historical record is made as much of gaps as of evidence.