At Glassely in County Kildare, a graveyard holds what remains of a medieval church dedicated to St. Patrick, and what remains amounts to almost nothing. A short run of foundation walling along the south side, traceable for just over four metres and barely twenty centimetres above ground, is essentially all that survives of the building above the soil. A single earthfast stone to the north may represent the outer face of the opposite wall, suggesting the church was around 7.15 metres wide externally, though even that figure depends on a good deal of conjecture. The rest has gone entirely, leaving the graveyard to carry more history than the architecture can.

Before the Reformation, the church of Glassealy sat within a web of ecclesiastical administration that connected it to institutions now equally obscure. Its tithes formed part of those belonging to the Rectory of Norrach, the place now known as Narraghmore, and that rectory in turn was held by the Nunnery of Tymolynbegg, the small religious house at Timolin. This arrangement, recorded by Fitzgerald in the early twentieth century, places the church within the kind of layered medieval landholding that was common in the area before such arrangements were dissolved. What is still visible in the graveyard speaks to another family's long presence here: fragments of a Fitzgerald chest tomb and a Fitzgerald cross survive among the grave markers, and the foundation line of the south wall itself runs westward from a subterranean Fitzgerald burial vault. A chest tomb is a box-shaped funerary monument, raised on a plinth, and their survival in fragments at sites like this is not unusual; the vaults beneath, being underground, tend to fare rather better than anything above ground level.