There is a particular kind of archaeological loss that happens not through dramatic collapse but through incremental erasure, one ploughing season at a time. At Turnerstown in County Kildare, a medieval church known as Whitechurch, or Kilbawn, has followed exactly that trajectory. By the time anyone thought to measure the speed of its disappearance, the measuring had almost run out of things to record.

Writing in 1906, a local observer named Fitzsymons described what remained of the small oblong building: walls of undressed mortared limestone, badly dilapidated, with the west gable still standing roughly five feet high, while the north and east sides had sunk nearly level with the ground. He recorded internal dimensions of roughly 7.5 metres east to west and 4.3 metres north to south, and noted a doorway about 1.4 metres wide near the western end of the south wall. The church sat on the boundary between the townlands of Turnerstown and Fox-hill, the latter formerly known as Knockshannagh, and its surrounding burial ground had already been entirely obliterated by Fitzsymons's time. A mearin-ditch is a boundary ditch marking the division between townlands, and the ruin had become part of one, absorbed into the landscape's administrative geometry rather than preserved apart from it. When the site was inspected again in 1985, the walls had been reduced to just 0.9 metres in height and the entrance could no longer be identified; the field had been ploughed right to the base of the remaining stonework. By 1996, the walls themselves were gone. What was left was a patch of unploughed clay, roughly 18 metres by 16 metres, sitting in an otherwise cultivated field, the soil simply too disturbed at that spot to work in the same way as the ground around it. The church's absence had become its only legible feature.