That absence is itself a kind of curiosity, a structure so thoroughly vanished that its existence survives only in historical cartography and a single scholarly reference.

The windmill at Raheny earns its place in the record thanks to a nautical chart produced in 1765 by Scalé and Richards. On that chart, the mill is noted not as an industrial landmark or a feature of the rural landscape, but as a seamark, meaning it was considered prominent enough to serve as a navigational reference point for vessels working their way along the coastline. Seamarks were ordinary structures, towers, steeples, or mills, that happened to be visible from the water and useful to sailors taking their bearings before the era of buoys and lighthouses made such improvised aids less necessary. That a windmill in Raheny fulfilled this function tells us something about its height and position relative to the bay, even if no physical trace of it survives. The reference is cited by John de Courcy in his 1996 work on the Liffey, which drew on historical charts to reconstruct the changing character of Dublin's coastline and its landmarks.

Because the structure is not visible at ground level, there is no conventional way to stand before it. What remains is effectively an archival site rather than a physical one. A visit to Raheny today would need to be accompanied by a copy of the 1765 Scalé and Richards chart to make any real sense of where the mill once stood in relation to the shoreline and the bay beyond. The area around Raheny has changed considerably since the eighteenth century, with land reclamation and suburban development reshaping the coastal edge, so even the views that once made the mill useful to sailors would look quite different now.