What stands in a graveyard near the River Liffey in County Kildare is not so much a ruin as the ghost of one. The east gable of a Lady Chapel, its lower courses of finely dressed granite ashlar still upright, now forms part of a graveyard boundary wall, pressed into service as a field boundary long after the abbey it belonged to was systematically dismantled. The stone did not simply fall; it was carted away in the early nineteenth century and used to build military barracks at Newbridge. What survives above ground amounts to a fragment of a fragment, the base of a large window, a length of arcading stripped of its dressed stone, a projecting angle. Beneath the surrounding pasture, however, the picture is considerably larger.

The priory was founded in 1202 by Meyler Fitzhenry and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St David. Its canons came from Llanthony, an Augustinian monastery in Monmouthshire, Wales, and the community they established here grew into a substantial estate. When the monastery was suppressed on the 24th of November 1540, the dissolution inventory described a complex of some ambition: a church whose nave had served as the parish church from time immemorial, a cloister, a Lady Chapel, a belfry that jurors suggested could be converted into a fortilage for local defence, a dovecote set into the town walls, a mill, five castles, and possessions extending to over 1,260 acres. The last prior, Robert Wesley, received a pension of over thirteen pounds. The estate passed through several hands, including Edward Randolfe, Sir Nicholas White, and Sir Edmond Butler. By 1781, when the antiquary Austin Cooper sketched what remained, the nave still measured roughly 61 metres long, Gothic windows were yet standing, choir stalls were visible among the debris, and the tomb of Bishop Walter Wellesley could still be read. That tomb has since been removed to St Brigid's Cathedral in Kildare town, where it remains.

A geophysical survey carried out in 2006 mapped around seven hectares of sub-surface remains associated with the priory, including probable burials, a possible trivallate enclosure, a street pattern, burgage plots, and plough furrows on several alignments, suggesting not just a monastery but a small dependent settlement that vanished with it. Aerial imagery taken in 2018 shows extensive cropmarks spreading into the fields to the south, south-west, and west of the graveyard, the buried outline of a community that once occupied this quiet stretch of level ground between the Liffey and the low rise to the east.