No stone, no outline, no earthwork marks the spot where it once stood in the townland of Tonlegee, in the barony of Coolock. What remains is cartographic rather than physical: a small drawn form on a historic map, holding the memory of a building that has otherwise vanished entirely into the ground.

The evidence comes from two overlapping surveys carried out in the 1650s, both products of the Cromwellian administration's effort to document and redistribute Irish land following the wars of that decade. The Down Survey, completed between 1655 and 1656 and directed by William Petty, recorded a gabled house at this location, depicted on its accompanying map. The Civil Survey, conducted at roughly the same time, references thatched houses in the area, and researcher Geraldine Stout, drawing on Robert Simington's 1945 edition of those records, notes that Tonlegee may have been the site of one of them. Whether the gabled structure shown on the Down Survey map and the thatched buildings of the Civil Survey refer to the same dwelling, or to different ones on the same land, cannot now be confirmed. What both surveys together suggest is a modest but real domestic presence here in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the kind of rural household that rarely made it into the documentary record except by accident of bureaucratic thoroughness.

There is nothing to see at Tonlegee today, and that absence is itself the point of noting it. The site lies within a housing estate, and no visible surface trace of the earlier structure survives. It appears in the archaeological record not because anything was excavated or preserved, but because two colonial land surveys happened to capture it before it disappeared. For anyone interested in how ordinary pre-modern settlement has been overlaid by later development across north County Dublin, Tonlegee is a useful, if sobering, example. The record exists; the place, in any tangible sense, does not.