There is a graveyard in Kilnagrange, County Waterford, that cannot be seen. Standing in the pasture at the bottom of a quiet stream valley, there is nothing to indicate that a church and its burial ground once occupied the ground beneath your feet. No stones, no mounds, no boundary lines. The site is simply grass.

The place is believed to mark the parish church of Fews, which had already fallen into dereliction by the late sixteenth century, according to a record cited by Power in 1897. By the time the scholar John O'Donovan visited in the early nineteenth century, as noted in a later publication by O'Flanagan in 1929, the church and graveyard had been removed without trace. O'Donovan was recording this absence by 1840, meaning the erasure was complete within living memory of people then alive. Whether the stones were robbed out for building material elsewhere, or the site simply collapsed and was absorbed into the agricultural landscape over generations, the result is the same: a parish church and the graves of its community have vanished so thoroughly that nothing remains at ground level. The stream runs about fifty metres to the west and south, which would have made this a sheltered, well-watered location, the sort of spot that early ecclesiastical settlements in Ireland frequently favoured. Roughly two hundred and fifty metres to the south-east, a natural spring survives, locally regarded as a holy well, which hints at the sacred geography that once organised this corner of the valley.