On a gentle south-facing slope in Dunmurry, County Kildare, there is a graveyard where a church once stood, or at least was believed to stand. The curious thing is that by the time anyone went looking for it, the building had effectively ceased to exist, leaving behind not ruins but an absence.

Taylor's 1783 Map of County Kildare marks a ruined church at this location, suggesting that even in the late eighteenth century the structure was already in decline. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch mapping in 1838, the church had been dropped from the record entirely; only the graveyard appears. The same is true of the revised edition a century later. When the site was visited in 1987, there were no visible surface traces of any church remaining. What survives is a graveyard that is itself largely modern, with almost all the headstones dating from the twentieth century. The ground has, in effect, swallowed one history and quietly replaced it with another.