At the eastern edge of an overgrown graveyard in Ladytown, County Kildare, a small rectangular structure sits so smothered in vegetation that it barely announces itself. It is not a tomb, not a chapel remnant, and not a folly. It is a watch-house, built most likely in the nineteenth century for a grimly practical purpose: keeping watch over fresh graves to deter bodysnatchers and others who might interfere with burials.

The watch-house measures roughly five and a half metres on its longer axis and three metres across, with a doorway set into the north-west wall, from which a sentry could observe the graveyard through the night. What makes the structure quietly interesting is what it appears to be built from. The church that once stood nearby has been levelled, its outline reduced to faint traces in the ground, but some of its stone seems to have found a second life in the watch-house walls. A large square granite block sits at the southern corner, and a well-dressed chamfered block, the kind of carefully shaped stonework associated with medieval or early post-medieval ecclesiastical building, has been reused as the lintel above the doorway. The church, in other words, was partly cannibalised to protect the very graveyard it once served.