The Hearth Money Rolls, a tax survey levied by the Restoration government on every fireplace in Ireland, capture Glasnevin at two distinct moments: in 1664, ten houses with hearths were recorded there, and by 1667 that number had grown to twenty-four. Among those later households, a handful were prosperous enough to rate two hearths and an oven, suggesting a small but differentiated community, with some residents capable of commercial-scale baking or food preparation alongside their domestic fires.

The detail behind these figures comes from two sources working across roughly the same generation. Francis Ball, writing in his history of the county published in 1920, drew on the Rolls to reconstruct the settlement's social texture. The farms attached to those hearth-bearing households can also be traced on a map derived from a survey recorded in 1640 by a man named Richard Francis, whose work preserves the outline of Glasnevin's agricultural landscape just before the upheavals of the 1640s Confederate Wars reshaped so much of Irish rural life. The Hearth Money Rolls themselves were introduced in 1662 as a revenue measure under Charles II, with householders assessed at two shillings per hearth annually; exemptions existed for the very poor, which means the recorded houses represent those above subsistence level rather than the full population.

The documentary traces of this settlement are held in archives rather than visible on any street corner in modern Glasnevin, which long ago absorbed its early modern village core into the broader fabric of the city. Researchers interested in the original farm boundaries would do well to consult the Francis map alongside Ball's county history, both of which are accessible through the National Library of Ireland and relevant local studies collections. The Glasnevin area is well served by public transport, and the National Botanic Gardens occupy ground that was itself part of the wider agricultural hinterland these records describe. What the Hearth Money Rolls leave behind is less a landmark than a legible moment, a count of fires in a small settlement, warm and specific against the general darkness of the pre-census past.