It appears in the record only as a ghost, a brief mention that has survived largely because of the diligence of Victorian antiquarians and the survival of a handful of seventeenth-century surveys. No address survives. No occupant is named. What remains is little more than a signal that something was once here.

The reference surfaces in the Riding the Franchises of 1603, a ceremonial perambulation of the city boundaries that Dublin Corporation conducted periodically to assert its jurisdictional rights. The record of this particular riding was compiled by J. T. Gilbert, the prolific Dublin archivist and historian, drawing on the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, volume one. The Riding of the Franchises was a formal civic ritual, a procession along the city limits that served both a legal and a symbolic function, confirming where Dublin's authority began and ended. That a dwelling appears in this context suggests it lay somewhere near or along that boundary route. The same structure, or at least the same reference, was later captured in the Down Survey composite maps for County Dublin, produced between 1655 and 1656. The Down Survey, directed by William Petty, was one of the most ambitious cartographic projects of seventeenth-century Ireland, mapping land ownership following the Cromwellian conquest. Appearing in both sources gives this particular entry a slightly longer paper trail than most, though it does not bring us much closer to knowing precisely where the building stood.

For anyone drawn to this kind of deliberately elusive history, the trail leads into archives rather than out onto the street. The Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin and Gilbert's wider body of work are held in Dublin City Library and Archive at Pearse Street, which maintains substantial collections relating to the city's civic and cartographic history. The Down Survey maps themselves have been digitised and are freely accessible online through the Down Survey Project hosted by Trinity College Dublin, where composite county maps can be browsed and searched. What a visitor cannot do is stand in front of the building itself. Its location within Dublin's south city remains unresolved, and no physical trace has been identified. The value of the entry lies less in what it tells us than in what it hints at, that the built fabric of early seventeenth-century Dublin was considerably denser and more varied than the surviving streetscape would suggest.