By the time it disappeared, probably sometime in the 1940s, it was already an anomaly: a fragment of early modern domestic architecture surviving in a city that had largely moved on without it.

The evidence for what Kilmainham once looked like comes from two sources separated by less than a decade. The Down Survey, carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty as part of the Cromwellian land redistribution programme, mapped three gabled houses at what it called 'Kilmainham town', suggesting a recognisable if modest settlement at that date. A few years later, the Hearth Money Roll for County Dublin, compiled in 1664, recorded 48 properties in the area. The Hearth Money Roll was a taxation record based on the number of hearths in a dwelling, making it a useful if imperfect guide to the scale and relative prosperity of a community. Forty-eight properties points to a settlement of some substance, even if none of the buildings were grand. According to research cited by O'Dwyer in 1981, at least one of those structures persisted until the 1940s before finally vanishing.

Today there is no visible trace. The site sits within the broader Kilmainham area of Dublin's south city, now better known for the nearby gaol and the Royal Hospital, and nothing marks where the old town's domestic buildings once stood. For anyone interested in the layers beneath a familiar streetscape, the absence itself is the point: the Down Survey maps, accessible through the relevant digitised archives, remain the clearest surviving image of what those three gabled houses once looked like from above, small rooflines plotted in ink on a document drawn up for purposes of dispossession rather than preservation.