At Muckross in County Kerry, the ground beneath the celebrated Franciscan friary holds the memory of an earlier church, one that was destroyed by fire in the twelfth century and has left nothing visible above the surface. The absence itself is what makes the site worth pausing over: visitors moving through the friary's cloisters are walking, unknowingly, over the ghost of an older religious foundation.

According to Barrington, writing in 1976, Muckross Abbey was raised on the footprint of this earlier church. The friary, a Franciscan house founded in the fifteenth century, became the dominant structure on the site and in time overshadowed any record of what preceded it. The fire that claimed the original church would have occurred during a period of considerable upheaval across Munster, when monastic and ecclesiastical sites were frequently vulnerable to the violence of dynastic competition. Nothing of that earlier building has survived, either in standing fabric or as an excavated feature, and its dedication and precise origins remain unrecorded.