That is almost all we know. No map marks it, no ruin survives, and no local tradition seems to have preserved its memory. What remains is a single phrase, recorded in a survey conducted during one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history, describing something already fading from the landscape.

The reference comes from the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a remarkable administrative undertaking carried out under Cromwellian rule in the aftermath of the Confederate Wars. The survey was intended to document landholding across Ireland, partly to facilitate the redistribution of land to Cromwellian soldiers and settlers, and it preserves incidental details that no other source bothered to record. Among those details, noted by Robert C. Simington in his 1945 edition of the survey, is the mention of an "old thatcht house" in Coolock. The use of the word "old" by a mid-seventeenth-century surveyor suggests the structure was already of some age, pointing to origins in the sixteenth century or possibly earlier. Thatched buildings of that era were typically low timber-framed or mud-walled structures, domestic and modest, the kind of vernacular architecture that rarely survived even into the following generation, let alone to the present day.

Because the exact location is unknown, there is nothing to visit in any conventional sense. Coolock today is a dense residential area, its older landscape long built over. The interest here lies less in a physical destination than in the exercise of historical imagination: somewhere beneath streets and housing estates, in a parish that appears in records going back to the medieval period, a thatched house stood long enough to be noticed and then disappeared so completely that even its position on the ground cannot be recovered. The record compiled by Geraldine Stout serves as a small act of preservation, keeping the bare fact of the building's existence from vanishing entirely.