House - 16th/17th century, Santry, Co. Dublin

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Santry, Co. Dublin

Somewhere north of Dublin, a house and stable recorded in meticulous seventeenth-century surveys have vanished so completely that nothing remains visible at ground level.

No ruin, no outline, no upstanding wall; just ordinary ground concealing what was once, at least on paper, a documented domestic property in the townland recorded as Loughill-Mullingshole.

The evidence for this site comes from two of the most ambitious administrative surveys carried out in Ireland during the 1650s. The Civil Survey, compiled between 1654 and 1656 and edited by R.C. Simington, lists a house and stable at Loughill-Mullingshole, a placename that no longer appears on modern maps. The Down Survey, completed around the same period under the direction of William Petty as part of Cromwellian land redistribution efforts, provides a mapped counterpart; its cartography places the site on the east side of the road running between Dublin and Santry, within an area that corresponds broadly to the vicinity of Magenta Hall. Together, the two surveys offer a rare pairing of documentary record and approximate spatial location, yet the structure itself has left no trace that can be identified from the surface. Whether it was demolished, absorbed into later building work, or simply levelled over time is not recorded.

The location, as best as it can be fixed, lies along the old Dublin to Santry road corridor, east of the main route and somewhere near Magenta Hall. This is not a site that rewards a visit in the conventional sense; there is nothing to see, and no marker draws attention to where the building once stood. Its interest lies precisely in that absence, in what the archival record preserves when the physical fabric has gone entirely. For anyone working through the Civil Survey or the Down Survey maps, this entry is a useful reminder of how much seventeenth-century settlement has disappeared without archaeological trace, and how much of what we know about early modern Irish domestic buildings depends on documents rather than remains.

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Santry, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU00651

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