Within the grounds of Kilkea Demesne in County Kildare, a medieval church survives only as low, roughly coursed limestone walls, barely knee-high in places. What makes the remains quietly interesting is not their height but their layout: a nave with entrances set directly opposite one another, a chancel to the east, and two distinct chapels added to the main body of the building, one serving as a Fitzgerald mortuary chapel at the west side of the nave, the other a Lady Chapel to the north. That combination of private aristocratic burial space and Marian devotional chapel, attached to a modest parish church, tells you something about the layered ambitions of medieval ecclesiastical building in Kildare.

The church appears in the documentary record from around 1270 to 1280, when it was included in a list of Deaneries of Dublin, and again in an ecclesiastical taxation dating to 1302 to 1306. It later came under the jurisdiction of Graney, a nearby priory. The Fitzgerald association with the mortuary chapel is significant: the Fitzgeralds were among the most powerful Anglo-Norman dynasties in medieval Ireland, and their presence here, even in the form of a small chapel measuring just five metres by three, signals the kind of local influence that shaped parish geography across Leinster. A royal visitation in 1615 recorded both the church and chancel as being in good repair, which makes the speed of subsequent decline all the more striking. By 1630, a mere fifteen years later, the same structures were described as ruinous. The nave itself measured 13.2 metres by 7.3 metres, with the chancel extending a further 9.2 metres to the east, so these were not insignificant buildings. Whatever combination of neglect, political upheaval, and shifting religious patronage brought them to ruin did so with unusual speed.