That is roughly what happened at this site in the small County Kilkenny village of Dungarvan, where a medieval parish church dedicated to St David, Bishop of Menevia, whose feast falls on the first of March, once stood close to the centre of a settlement that also contained a motte and a castle within a hundred metres or so in either direction.

Before the Reformation, the parish was impropriate in the Priory of the Augustinian Canons of the Congregation of St Victor, based at St Catherine's in Waterford City. A royal visitation in 1615 found the church and its chancel in good repair. By 1799, when the antiquarian Austin Cooper sketched it, the building was still standing: his drawing shows a nave with a bell cot on the west gable, and a two-storey castellated structure at the east end, with the chancel at ground level and living or storage accommodation above, its parapets stepped up at the corners. The Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656 add a further curiosity: the barony map marks the building as a church on glebe land, while the parish map of Dungarvan draws the same structure as a castle, which may be a cartographic error or may reflect the unusual residential tower attached to the chancel. By around 1811, the medieval walls had been taken down to make room for a Protestant church, built partly over and partly north of the original footprint, with the old south wall sitting roughly three metres south of its replacement. That Protestant church has since become a ruin in its own right, and nothing of the medieval structure survives at ground level.

What does remain is the graveyard. Among its monuments, noted by Carrigan writing in 1905, are around half a dozen coffin-shaped, uninscribed slabs with incised crosses and, on some, relief carvings of human heads. The graveyard also contains an effigial tomb, a graveslab of head-slab type, and a tapering graveslab, all of which are still visible. These stone markers, outlasting every wall and window that once stood among them, are now the most legible part of a site whose architectural history has otherwise been almost entirely erased.