Somewhere beneath the ground of Tristernagh Demesne in County Westmeath lie the displaced bones of those buried in a medieval priory graveyard, shovelled into a pit in 1783 by a landowner who wanted the space for a mansion. No headstones survive, no walls mark the boundary, and the ground gives no indication that anything sacred once occupied it.

The graveyard belonged to the Augustinian Priory of Tristernagh, sometimes called the Priory of Kilbixy, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was founded in the late twelfth century by Geoffrey de Constantine, who came from Cosmeston Castle in Glamorganshire, and it accumulated considerable holdings over the following centuries. A twelfth-century charter lists its possessions in remarkable detail: islands in nearby Lough Iron, fisheries, mills, woodland, churches scattered across the midlands, and even a property outside the walls of Dublin near the village of Hogges. Simon Rochfort, Bishop of Meath, granted the priory the privileges of a free churchyard, a medieval legal status that offered the burial ground a degree of protection and independence from outside interference. That protection counted for nothing in 1783 when Sir Pigott William Piers had the priory demolished to make way for Tristernagh House. Contemporary accounts, quoted by the nineteenth-century historian Cogan, describe him as having "sacrilegiously invaded the graveyard" and ordering that skulls, bones, and tombs be torn from their resting places and dumped in a hole. A stable and cow-house stood on the site of the priory by the early nineteenth century. The house itself was eventually sold through the Encumbered Estates Court, a mechanism used in the aftermath of the Famine to liquidate properties burdened by debt. Lough Iron, which once lapped within 280 metres of the demesne, has since retreated further still following drainage works on the Inny River in the late 1960s, so even the landscape the monks knew has been quietly rearranged.