It is the kind of label that implies something deliberate and considered, a structure built to be looked at rather than lived in. By 1981, when the site was formally recorded, there was nothing left to see, and no trace in the ground to suggest anything had ever stood there at all.

The 'temple' in question would almost certainly have been a garden folly, the sort of ornamental Classical structure that Georgian landowners placed at calculated distances within their demesnes to create pleasing vistas and signal a familiarity with antiquity. Such follies were fashionable across Ireland and Britain from roughly the mid-eighteenth century onward, and they ranged from elaborate stone rotundas to little more than a facade propped up in a shrubbery. Baronstown House lay around 150 metres to the west of wherever this one stood. When the site was visited and logged in 1981, the assessment was blunt: nothing remained, nor was there any indication of its former existence. The parkland had simply absorbed it.

What survives, then, is essentially a cartographic ghost. The 1837 map is the sole evidence that the structure existed at all, and even that tells us nothing about what it looked like, when it was built, or when it disappeared. There is a particular quality to places like this, sites that have left no archaeology and no standing fabric, only a name on an old map and a question that cannot now be answered.