No earthworks, no crop marks, no trace visible from the air or the ground. It is a place that survives only in paperwork.

The paperwork, however, is oddly vivid. An indenture dated 1st May 1572, preserved in the Ormond Deeds, records Sir Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, granting the town or village of Phisizianeston, otherwise known as Ballynesigy, to a clerk named William Croke of Keaphedien. The lease ran for twenty-one years. The annual rent owed to the Earl was four pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence, along with a poundage hog, a summer sheep, and six watch hens. Butler also reserved to himself all game on the lands, and retained the moiety, meaning half, of all heriots, strays, and profits of courts. Heriots were customary dues paid to a lord on the death of a tenant, typically the tenant's best beast or chattel, so the clause gives a sense of how tightly such arrangements were structured. The document is a late glimpse of a place that had presumably been in decline for some time before the Dissolution-era reshuffling of Ormond estates brought it briefly back into the written record. The curious doubling of its name, Phisizianeston and Ballynesigy, points to a settlement old enough to have accumulated two distinct identities, one likely of English administrative origin and the other Gaelic.