At the western edge of a graveyard in Taghadoe, County Kildare, there is a church that has effectively ceased to exist above the ground. No walls, no outline of stone, no visible trace at surface level. And yet, for a period in the nineteenth century, it was mapped, named, and measured, a rectangular structure roughly thirty metres long and ten metres wide, recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1838 under the matter-of-fact label "RC Chapel in ruins." By the time the revised edition appeared in 1911, it had been dropped from the map entirely. Whatever stood there had, in the intervening decades, disappeared so completely that even the cartographers saw no reason to note it.

The graveyard itself sits within a much older landscape. Taghadoe is an early monastic site, and the burial ground that contains this vanished chapel is considered part of that complex. The church, if it was indeed a distinct structure and not a remnant of something earlier, was probably built sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a period when Catholic communities across Ireland were constructing modest places of worship, often on the margins of existing sacred ground. What became of it is not recorded. A geophysical survey carried out as part of an unpublished MA thesis at NUI Maynooth in 2005, by a researcher named M. Byrne, detected what may be subsurface remains of the building, confirming that something is still present beneath the soil even if it has long since vanished from sight.