Some places are defined not by what survives but by what cannot be found. At Ballymany in County Kildare, the record of a church rests almost entirely on a single cartographic notation and a thread of local memory, neither of which has ever been confirmed in the ground.

The trail begins with Alexander Taylor's 1783 Map of County Kildare, which marks a church at the site. Beyond that one reference, no other historic map corroborates its existence. An early twentieth-century article in the Journal of the Kildare Archaeological Society, attributed to Fitzgerald and published between 1903 and 1905, also mentions the remains of a church here, and oral tradition in the area placed a structure somewhat to the north of Taylor's marked location. When the proposed construction of the Droichead Nua By-Pass in 1989 brought archaeologists to the site under excavation licence E000484, financed by Kildare County Council, there was genuine reason to hope that the question might finally be settled. It was not. Investigators quickly found that extensive quarrying had heavily disturbed the area, and despite examining a considerable extent of ground, no physical evidence of any church came to light. The absence is itself the finding: a structure confidently noted on an eighteenth-century map and discussed in learned journals simply left nothing behind, or nothing that survived the subsequent quarrying, or perhaps was never precisely where anyone thought it was.