Somewhere in the flat agricultural land around Kiltaghan in County Kildare, a burial ground has been quietly disappearing from the record for the better part of three centuries. There is nothing to see at the site today, no stones, no hollows, no irregularity in the soil; just a low, reclaimed tillage ridge running roughly east-south-east to west-north-west, ploughed and reshaped until whatever once marked the ground has been swallowed entirely.

The place survives mainly as a name. It was known formerly as Shanrelicke, an anglicisation of the Irish for "old graveyard", which suggests the site had already acquired an antique reputation before anyone thought to write it down. It appears on John Rocque's 1760 map of Rathangan Manor, where it is marked as an old burial place, and that cartographic record was picked up by Fitzgerald in 1907, who noted with some precision that the same spot had been recorded on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1838, not as a graveyard at all, but as a gravel pit. The sequence tells its own story: a place of burial becomes, within living memory or shortly after, a source of extracted material, and the name Shanrelicke quietly detaches from any visible feature on the ground. By the time Fitzgerald was writing, the transformation was already complete.