Somewhere in a coniferous forest on the Clonagam estate in County Waterford, there are medieval stones that once formed the west window of a cathedral. They have been lying there, more or less forgotten, for well over a century. How they came to be scattered among the trees is a story involving architectural salvage, aristocratic ambition, and a project that was never finished.

When the original Christ Church Cathedral in Waterford collapsed in 1770, the Marquess of Waterford saw an opportunity. He had the stones from the cathedral's west window transported to his estate at Clonagam, intending to re-erect them beside a replica round tower he was constructing on Tower Hill. Round towers are the slender, tapering stone towers associated with early Irish monasteries, built from around the ninth century onwards, and the Marquess was having one built in deliberate imitation of that tradition. The project, however, was never completed. The tower still stands at roughly twenty metres, well short of what a full round tower would reach, and as early as 1894 observers were noting that the cathedral stones had become scattered. Some have since been identified within a coniferous plantation on the estate. Others may have been moved again in the 1920s, this time to Kilbunny church, though that relocation remains uncertain.

What survives, then, is a dispersal rather than a display: fragments of a medieval Waterford cathedral window that have passed through at least two, possibly three, resting places, none of them the one originally intended. The incomplete tower stands as its own quiet record of the same unfinished ambition.