That near-total disappearance is itself the most arresting thing about the site at Lisdowney: a place that was substantial enough to appear on a mid-seventeenth-century national land survey, and which still showed foundations when archaeologists visited in 1987, has since been reduced to little more than a field.

The Down Survey, a remarkable mapping project carried out between 1655 and 1658 to catalogue land ownership following the Cromwellian settlement, depicts a castle with a stone house adjoining at Lisdowney, and its accompanying terrier, a written description of landholdings, notes 'at Lisdowny a stone house in repaire and cabbins'. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, identified this as Lisdowney House, a property belonging to the Lords Mountgarret, one of the most prominent Butler family branches in Kilkenny, and apparently used by the junior members of that household. The last recorded occupant was a Miss Cheevers, who died around 1809; shortly afterwards the house was accidentally destroyed by fire. What followed was a gradual dismantling: walls taken down almost to ground level, outbuildings removed, garden boundaries levelled. Carrigan recorded the foundations as measuring roughly 15.5 metres by 6.4 metres internally, with walls nearly a metre thick, built of stone and grouting he described as being of extreme hardness. A further range of buildings, running at right angles from the south-west corner, added another 28 metres to the complex. The house and this attached range both appear to pre-date the large sub-rectangular enclosure, bounded partly by a stone wall and partly by a field bank, that once surrounded them. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its six-inch map around 1900, the house had already vanished from the cartographic record, having appeared on the first edition of 1839.

When the site was inspected in 1987, the foundations were still traceable on the ground, sitting in the south-east corner of that enclosure in the flat valley floor. By 2018, aerial imagery suggested even those remnants had been cleared. What was once a residence connected to one of Leinster's most powerful families now leaves no reliable surface trace at all.