Not demolished, not built over, simply overgrown, the small oval plot had disappeared beneath the vegetation within a decade of being first recorded. It is the kind of erasure that happens quietly, and it speaks to the particular vulnerability of these sites.

The place is a cillin, or children's burial ground, one of hundreds scattered across Ireland where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, often in secret, over many centuries. When surveyors visited in August 1982, they found an unenclosed oval area measuring roughly 7.6 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 7.1 metres across, with several grave-markers, some upright and some lying flat, still visible. A hawthorn tree, a species long associated with liminal and sacred spaces in Irish folk tradition, grew in the north-east quadrant of the plot. Just beyond it, the foundations of a modern rectangular house were also evident, the two structures sitting in an odd proximity across the townland boundary wall. When the same ground was revisited in September 1991, the burial markers had vanished beneath a dense growth of ferns. The site had not been recorded as disturbed or destroyed; it had simply become invisible.