Others survive only as marks on old maps, their physical traces long since swallowed by the landscape. The latter is the case with a dwelling recorded at Colmanstown in County Dublin, a structure that existed somewhere in this area during the sixteenth or seventeenth century and has since vanished so completely that its precise location is no longer known.

The sole evidence for the building's existence comes from the Down Survey, a remarkable cartographic project carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty. Commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to facilitate the redistribution of forfeited Irish lands, the Down Survey was the first systematic, large-scale mapping of Ireland, and it recorded not just territorial boundaries but also the presence of settlements, churches, and dwellings across the country. The map for this area marks a dwelling at Colmanstown, which is enough to confirm that something was standing here in the mid-seventeenth century, almost certainly a structure with roots in the preceding century. Beyond that single cartographic notation, nothing further is recorded. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout, whose work drawing together these fragmentary references helps preserve awareness of places that might otherwise slip entirely from the historical account.

For anyone curious enough to visit the general area around Colmanstown in County Dublin, the experience is necessarily one of imagination rather than observation. There is no surviving structure to examine, no ruin to photograph, and no marker indicating where the building once stood. What the Down Survey map offers is a kind of ghost outline, a reminder that the countryside as it appears today is layered over earlier arrangements of habitation that have left little or no physical trace. Walking the landscape here, one is essentially walking through an absence, aware that a household of the Tudor or early Stuart period occupied this ground at some point, went about its daily life, and then disappeared from the record entirely.