In the mid-seventeenth century, a pair of cottages somewhere in the area then known as the Donahies, on the northern fringe of County Dublin, were noted as decayed, which means they were already old enough to be crumbling, already losing their shape back into the ground. No precise location has ever been established for them, and that absence is itself a kind of historical fact.

The source for what little we know is the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a systematic attempt by the Cromwellian administration to record landholding across Ireland, partly to facilitate the redistribution of land following the wars of the 1640s. The survey was not an archaeological document, and its authors had no particular interest in preserving the memory of vernacular cottages. That these two structures were noted at all, even briefly, is largely incidental. The reference is recorded by R.C. Simington in his 1945 edition of the survey, and the entry places the cottages at the Donahies, a townland name associated with the area that now forms part of the north Dublin suburbs. The record was compiled for this site by Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the monument record in August 2011.

There is, in practical terms, nothing to visit. The exact location of the monument is listed as unknown, and no physical trace has been identified on the ground. What remains is a single line in a survey conducted by a colonial administration recording, almost in passing, that two small dwellings had fallen into ruin. For anyone interested in the texture of early modern rural life in the Dublin hinterland, that kind of negative evidence carries its own weight. The Donahies area, now largely absorbed into suburban Donaghmede and the surrounding townlands, retains almost nothing of its pre-urban landscape, which makes the Civil Survey entry one of the few anchors to what the place once held.