A small pile of loose stones and boulders rests against a field fence, and somewhere nearby a low earthen bank curves in a wide arc through the grass, possibly the remnant of a circular or oval enclosure whose other edges have entirely vanished. By 1983 the site had been levelled, most likely through ordinary agricultural clearance, and today it leaves no trace on aerial photography. What makes this unremarkable-looking corner of a field worth attention is the company it keeps and the layers of memory that have accumulated around it despite the near-total disappearance of any physical evidence.

The area is known locally as Scarden, and it carries a long association with St Patrick. John O'Donovan, the nineteenth-century scholar and place-name surveyor, noted it in his celebrated field letters as the location called Scártán, described as a little brake where Patrick paused on his way to Clonard, the great monastic foundation in Meath. A holy well dedicated to St Patrick, sometimes called Scardan well, lies roughly 150 metres to the south-west, and local schoolchildren recording folklore in 1938 for what became the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection described tracks, trenches, and mounds in the vicinity that suggested the remains of a building and possibly a graveyard. The rectangular structure itself was already marked as a ruin on the Ordnance Survey's Fair Plan map of 1837, aligned east to west in the manner common to domestic and ecclesiastical buildings alike. By 1981, only the foundation courses could be traced through dense vegetation, and the working interpretation at that point was simply that it had been an old cottage, with no documented connection to the well nearby.

What lingers here is the gap between the thinness of the physical remains and the density of the folklore attached to the place. The possible enclosure to the south of the ruin, visible only as a faint scarp and bank forming part of an arc, has not been definitively identified, and no clear eastern, southern, or south-western sections of it survive. The holy well is the one feature that retains some presence on the ground, and it is worth seeking out if you are in the area, both for its own sake and because standing beside it gives some sense of why this quiet slope accumulated so much local memory across so many centuries.