There is a graveyard at Ardscull in County Kildare where a medieval church once stood, and yet no stone of that church remains above ground. What survives instead is the memory of a site that was evidently once far more substantial: the graveyard sits near the centre of a very large multivallate early ecclesiastical enclosure, meaning a sacred precinct originally defined by multiple concentric earthen banks or ditches. That enclosure has since been levelled entirely, leaving the landscape with almost no visible indication of what it once contained.

The church itself is first recorded in a list of the deaneries of the diocese of Dublin, probably compiled in the later 1270s, in which it was noted as belonging to the common fund of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. It retained that institutional connection in 1294, but by the sixteenth century its status had diminished considerably: it was by then described only as a chapel dependent on the mother-church of Moone, the nearby parish whose own early Christian associations are better known. Somewhere in the vicinity of the church, a borough of Ardscull is also historically attested, though its precise location has not been established. The combination of a large ecclesiastical enclosure, a dependent chapel, and a borough in the same small area suggests that Ardscull was once a place of considerably more local importance than its present quiet appearance might suggest.

The graveyard is still present and presumably still in use or care, which means the site is not entirely lost to view. A visitor walking through it would, however, find nothing architectural to examine. The interest here is almost entirely in what is absent, and in reading the flat ground around the graves as the ghost of a much older arrangement.