There is no doorway at the top, no threshold, no house; just a flat grassed platform where one of north County Dublin's more substantial mansions once stood. It is an quietly disorienting thing to encounter, and it marks the site of Santry Court, a brick mansion of 130 rooms that burned to the ground on the night of 24th October 1941 and was eventually demolished in 1959.

The history of the site runs considerably deeper than the house itself. The medieval manor of Santry, originally granted to the de Feypo family, was a substantial operation: a hall, chambers, stables, a bakery, and an orchard running to 200 apple trees and 100 pear trees, with tens of thousands of ash and alder trees across the wider landholding. It was the Barry family who built Santry Court in 1703, described at the time as a stately mansion of brick containing many spacious apartments, ornamented with family portraits, scriptural and historical paintings, and various works of fine art. The demesne itself covered 140 acres of pleasure grounds. In 1857, Sir Charles Compton William Domville undertook a sweeping renovation: all 130 rooms were redecorated, the gardens restored, a water supply laid on from the river, and ornamental gas lamps installed along an avenue that led to a replica of the Phoenix monument erected within the grounds. What the fire of 1941 left standing, decades of dereliction and eventual demolition finished off. A polished stone axehead found on the demesne in 1947 suggests the land had seen human activity long before any of this, and archaeological work carried out during a later commercial development identified two isolated pits and a probable garden feature.

The demesne today forms part of a public park on the northside of Dublin, close to the M50. The front steps and grassed platform are visible, and it is worth seeking out the entrance piers, where plaster friezes survive on the rear faces of the walls, their imagery drawn from the Parthenon. They are easy to walk past without noticing, set as they are on the less obvious side of the stonework. The walled garden also survives, giving some sense of the scale of what the demesne once enclosed.