There is something appropriately elusive about a medieval church that a researcher declares lost, only to find tucked behind a stable-yard almost as an afterthought. The church known as Fornathbeg, or Little Forenaghts, in County Kildare occupies exactly that kind of liminal position, somewhere between discovered and still missing, its existence confirmed by a footnote rather than a formal record.

Writing between 1899 and 1902, a scholar named Synnott traced the history of the church to a grant by one John de Lesse, who gave it to the Abbey of St Thomas in Dublin. That abbey, an Augustinian foundation, accumulated various ecclesiastical properties across the Pale during the medieval period, and Little Forenaghts appears to have been one such acquisition. Synnott initially concluded that no trace of the building or even its site could be found. Then, in a footnote appended after the main text was written, he revised that conclusion. He had identified what he believed to be the south and west walls of the old church standing to the west of the stable-yard at Forenaghts House, with the west wall running alongside a pond. Higher up the west gable, roughly twelve feet from the top, he noted two narrow square-headed windows, the kind of plain, functional openings common in rural medieval church architecture.

What makes this fragment worth attention is less what survives than the manner of its survival. Built into the margins of a working farmyard, abutting a pond, the walls were neither preserved as a monument nor entirely demolished. If Synnott's identification is correct, visitors to the area who know to look for a gable wall beside a stable-yard pond may still find those two small windows looking out from the stonework, easy to pass without recognising what they are.