It appears in the historical record as a single line, a brief notation of a building already falling into ruin, and then it disappears entirely. No walls remain above ground, no mapped outline survives, and no local tradition appears to have preserved its whereabouts. What we are left with is the bureaucratic ghost of a structure that was already, by the mid-seventeenth century, described as waste.

The reference comes from the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a remarkable document compiled under Cromwellian administration to establish land ownership across Ireland, largely as a prelude to redistribution and plantation. The survey recorded that in Garristown, on lands belonging to William Talbot of Robertstown in County Meath, described in the survey as an Irish Papist, there stood "one house and backside," the backside being a term for the yard or plot of land to the rear of a dwelling, let at the time for five shillings per annum and now waste. The designation of Talbot as an Irish Papist was not incidental; it was the language of dispossession, marking him as a likely candidate for the forfeiture of his lands under Cromwellian land policy. The five shillings rental, modest even by the standards of the period, suggests a small and probably unremarkable building, and the word waste implies it had already been abandoned or had fallen into disrepair before the surveyors arrived. The source was published by Robert Simington in 1945 as part of his edited series of the Civil Survey volumes.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to visit. Garristown is a small village in the north Dublin countryside, and while the general area of the townland can be walked, no feature on the ground has been linked to this particular property. The interest here is less archaeological than archival: a single entry in a seventeenth-century survey preserving the faint outline of a life, a tenancy, a landlord under political pressure, and a building already going back to the earth.