What is less expected is how thoroughly the original has been erased. The Church of Ireland church of St. David occupies a rectangular graveyard on level ground in County Wexford, its boundaries formed by masonry walls on the east and south, with earthen banks and trees marking the rest. No trace of any earlier structure is visible above ground, and yet this patch of Wexford farmland has been a place of Christian worship for at least four centuries, and almost certainly much longer.

The paper trail for the older church reaches back to 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a formal visitation of parishes under his care. He recorded that Nicholas Rochford held the position of rector and Jacob Synnott served as vicar, and that both the church and its chancel were at that point in reasonable repair. The picture had changed dramatically by the time Samuel Lewis compiled his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837. By then, the building he described was a small, plain structure, beyond saving, and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, a body established in the 1830s to manage Church of Ireland property and finances, had apparently resolved to replace it with something new. That replacement, St. David's, is what stands today. Whatever fabric survived from the medieval or early modern parish church of Mulrankin has long since been absorbed into the ground or cleared away entirely.