Recorded in the heritage inventory for Palmerstown Lower in County Dublin, this sixteenth or seventeenth century house exists today as little more than a cartographic ghost, its precise location lost to time, development, or simple bad luck.

The sole historical evidence for the structure comes from the Down Survey, the extraordinary mapping project carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty. Commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to catalogue forfeited Irish lands in granular detail, the Down Survey produced some of the most ambitious cartography Ireland had seen, and its maps remain a vital source for understanding the pre-plantation and early modern landscape. On one of those maps, a dwelling is marked in what is now Palmerstown Lower. Whether it was a modest farmer's house, a more substantial residence, or something in between, the record does not say. The entry was compiled by Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the national inventory in August 2011, and even at that point the notation was frank: the exact location of this monument is unknown.

For anyone with an interest in early modern Dublin, that honesty is itself worth pausing over. Palmerstown Lower today is absorbed into the western suburban spread of the city, and whatever stood here in the 1600s has left no visible trace above ground. There is no site to visit in any conventional sense, no marker, no ruin poking through undergrowth. What remains is the fact of the map, held in archive, showing that someone once lived here when Petty's surveyors passed through. The value is less in the going and more in the looking, perhaps at the Down Survey maps themselves, which are digitised and publicly accessible, and which reward close reading for anyone curious about what the Irish landscape looked like before so much of it was remade.