That is precisely what happened to Gill Abbey in Cork City, a house of Augustinian canons, the order of regular clergy who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine and lived a communal monastic life, whose buildings are now entirely gone and whose location is occupied by a public park.

The abbey took its name from Gilla Aedha O Muidhin, its first abbot, and was founded around 1136 to 1137 by Cormac MacCarthaig, the powerful king of Desmond, probably with connections to Connacht and possibly operating at first outside full Augustinian discipline. Its early decades were turbulent in ways that reveal how closely religious sites were bound up with political violence: in 1196, Anglo-Norman forces burned what the sources call 'the sanctuary', apparently to prevent it falling into the hands of the Munster Irish. Despite that, the house remained largely under Irish control throughout the medieval period, an unusual distinction. Its end came, as it did for so many Irish monasteries, in the sixteenth century. By 1541, the buildings were being assessed as useful to a farmer, with James, Earl of Ormond, identified as the relevant party, and the canons appear to have been forced out between 1542 and 1544.

What is left of Gill Abbey is dispersed and easy to miss. Some decorated stonework from the site was moved to the Republican plot in St Finbarr's Cemetery at Wilton, where two carved human heads, possibly dating to the thirteenth century, and a Latin cross are set into a pointed niche. Scholars have also proposed that certain Romanesque carved heads now held in St Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork may originally have come from the abbey, though this remains a suggestion rather than a certainty. The stones, in other words, outlasted the institution and the building, but only just, and only by travelling elsewhere.