We know this not from physical remains or documentary accounts, but from a single cartographic source, one of the most ambitious surveying projects ever undertaken in seventeenth-century Ireland. The houses themselves have left no confirmed trace on the ground, which is precisely what makes their recorded existence so quietly compelling.

The evidence comes from the Down Survey, carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest, the Down Survey was an enormous undertaking designed to map forfeited Irish lands in sufficient detail to allow their redistribution to soldiers and adventurers who had backed the parliamentary cause. Petty employed teams of surveyors to measure and record landholdings across the country, producing county and barony maps that, for all their political purpose, preserve incidental details of ordinary settlement that would otherwise be lost entirely. The three dwellings marked at Kilmashogue are exactly this kind of detail, small symbols on a map made for other reasons, indicating that people were living on this upland ground in the mid-seventeenth century, likely in structures dating to the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Their precise positions, however, have never been established, and the record compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy notes simply that the site is not precisely located.

Kilmashogue sits within the Dublin Mountains, and the area is accessible via the Kilmashogue Lane approach off the R116 between Rathfarnham and the Sally Gap road. The land is open upland, with a mix of forestry and moorland, and the Kilmashogue Mountain loop walk passes through the general area. Anyone with an interest in early modern settlement would do well to carry a copy of the relevant Down Survey barony map, which is freely available through the Trinity College Dublin digital collections, to get a sense of where Petty's surveyors placed those small dwelling symbols relative to the topography. There is nothing to see in the conventional sense, no standing walls, no earthworks confirmed to this period, but walking ground where three households once went about their lives, now traceable only through a line on a 370-year-old map, has a particular kind of weight to it.