We know this because they appear on a map. Beyond that, almost everything about them has dissolved into the landscape, leaving behind only the faint cartographic trace of their existence and the quiet puzzle of where, precisely, they might have been.

The evidence comes from the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, one of the most ambitious mapping projects of seventeenth-century Ireland. Commissioned by Oliver Cromwell's government and directed by the scientist and economist William Petty, the Down Survey was designed to record landholdings across Ireland in extraordinary detail, largely to facilitate the redistribution of land following the Cromwellian conquest. It remains an invaluable, if politically charged, document of the Irish landscape at that moment. On those maps, the Parslickstown townland, a townland being the smallest administrative unit of land division in Ireland, shows two structures marked simply as 'farme houses'. Whether they dated from the early or later end of the sixteenth and seventeenth century range, who built them, and who was living in them when the surveyors passed through, the record does not say. Compiled by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the national monuments record in August 2011, the entry is candid about the limits of what survives: the exact location of this monument is unknown.

For anyone curious enough to visit Parslickstown, the experience is less about finding something and more about understanding how much has been lost to time, land clearance, and the simple accumulation of centuries. The townland lies in north County Dublin, in an area that has seen considerable change since the mid-seventeenth century. There is nothing to see at ground level, no standing walls, no earthworks, no marker. The reward here is of a different kind, the knowledge that somewhere underfoot or beneath a field boundary, the faint material memory of two ordinary working farmhouses may still linger, unexcavated and unlocated, waiting on a more precise question.