Somewhere in the Kildare townland of Barrettstown, modern headstones stand not on solid ground but on top of a building, or rather on what remains of one. A low, grass-covered rectangular mound, roughly thirteen metres long and just under a metre high, is all that survives of a church that had already vanished by the time the Ordnance Survey revised its maps in 1910. The people burying their dead in this graveyard chose the mound as a convenient raised platform, layering the present over the past in a way that is quietly telling.

When the Ordnance Survey first mapped this area at six-inch scale in 1838, the church was recorded as a standing rectangular structure, oriented northeast to southwest and measuring approximately twenty metres in length and eight metres in width. By the time the survey was updated in 1910, the notation had changed to "Site of", the cartographer's way of acknowledging that the building itself was gone. What survived above ground had shrunk considerably; the mound today measures thirteen metres east to west and five metres wide, suggesting that material was removed or simply dispersed over the intervening decades. The church sat at the centre of a large graveyard, which is itself associated with a holy well nearby and with what may be an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that often marks an early medieval religious settlement in Ireland. Together, these elements suggest a site of some age and significance, though the documentary record does not yet fill in the details of who founded it or when it fell out of use.