That detail alone, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of the nineteenth century, suggests this was no ordinary burial ground. The fosse and drawbridge are gone now, as is virtually everything else; the area has been developed and no visible surface remains survive to mark the spot.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of antiquarian field notes compiled in the 1830s, describe church remains that were formerly accessible from the neighbouring Kilnamanagh Castle. The church was associated with the disused graveyard, that strangely fortified enclosure with its drawbridge, and the whole complex is thought to occupy the site of the early medieval monastery known as Cell Manach Eascrach, a name meaning roughly the church of the monks of Esker. Scholars including Ua Broin, Ball, and Handcock have each identified this as the probable location of that foundation, linking the placename Kilnamanagh, which derives from the Irish for the monks' church, directly to an early Christian community that once farmed and prayed on this ground. The castle itself, which stood nearby, likely drew on the existing ecclesiastical infrastructure of the site, a common enough pattern in medieval Ireland where secular and religious occupation layered themselves over centuries.

There is, in practical terms, nothing to see at this location today. The development of the surrounding area has erased all physical trace of the church, the graveyard, and the fosse. What remains is the record: the Ordnance Survey Letters, available through various archives and published transcriptions, offer the most vivid account of what once stood here. For anyone interested in the early ecclesiastical landscape of County Dublin, the site is worth knowing about precisely because of its absence, as a reminder of how much has vanished beneath the modern city, and how much of what we know about it survives only in the notes of nineteenth-century antiquarians who thought to write it down.