In a corner of County Kildare, a graveyard known locally as Yew Tree Cemetery carries a peculiar distinction: it was once the keeping place of a saint's bell, preserved not as a devotional object but as a swearing relic, something people touched or invoked when making a solemn oath. The practice of venerating saints' bells in this way was well established in early medieval Ireland, where such objects were believed to carry a binding, sometimes punitive, spiritual force. That this one lingered here long after the religious community had dissolved says something about the tenacity of local memory.

Writing in 1902 to 1903, the Countess of Drogheda recorded that the site had once served as a branch of St. Evin's Monastery, the mother house of which lies nearby in Kildare. St. Evin, also associated with Monasterevin, whose very placename preserves his memory, was an early Irish monastic figure, and the presence of a dependent cell at Clogheen suggests the monastery held some regional influence. What survives today amounts to three distinct elements: the Yew Tree Graveyard itself, a church site, and a possible ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of boundary, typically a curving bank or ditch, that would have defined the sacred precinct of an early Christian foundation and separated it from the secular landscape beyond.