Somewhere in County Kildare, a graveyard sits unfenced in an open field, with no wall or boundary to mark where the living world ends and the burial ground begins. The site at Sherlockstown is not a ruin in any dramatic sense; it is simply a piece of ground that has quietly outlasted the structure it once belonged to, the old church that formerly stood within its precincts long since gone, leaving the enclosure to dissolve back into the landscape around it.

The graveyard lies in a small wood, roughly a hundred metres north of what may have been a tower house and an associated mansion, suggesting that this was once a complex of some significance. A tower house, for those unfamiliar with the form, is a compact fortified dwelling common in late medieval Ireland, typically a tall stone structure built as much for status as for defence. The Sherlock family vault sits within what remains of the old churchyard, and the family connection is not merely historical. In more recent times the graveyard has continued to function as a private burial ground for the Sherlocks, making it one of those unusual places where the medieval and the modern overlap in an entirely unannounced way. The placename Sherlockstown itself signals the family's long association with this part of Kildare, a continuity that the quiet, unfenced field does little to advertise.