On the south bank of the Liffey, west of Islandbridge, there once stood a brick house of some significance, notable enough to be recorded as a ruin as far back as the mid-seventeenth century, yet now so thoroughly erased that the ground offers no hint it was ever there.

The earliest surviving reference to the structure comes from the Books of Reference accompanying the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, a monumental Cromwellian-era land mapping project that documented property across Ireland in extraordinary detail, often noting what had already been lost. The entry, cited by Simington in 1945, records the ruins of a brick house at Inchicore. Brick construction was relatively uncommon in Ireland at this period, when stone and timber predominated, and its use here suggests a building of some pretension, likely dating to the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The same structure is tentatively identified with Inchicore House as it appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1963, though by that point the building itself was long gone, surviving only as a placename on a cartographic record.

There is, in the plainest sense, nothing to see here now. The site sits in what has become a dense urban area of south Dublin, absorbed into the fabric of the city over successive centuries of development. No wall, foundation, or earthwork survives above ground. What makes it worth knowing about is less the place itself than what its trace in the documentary record represents: a building already ruined by the 1650s, recorded almost in passing by surveyors who were more concerned with land ownership than architectural history, and then quietly forgotten for three hundred years. Researchers interested in early modern Dublin or the Down Survey itself will find the Simington reference a useful starting point, even if the ground it describes has nothing left to offer.