No walls, no arch, no carved stone breaking the surface; the whole site sits below ground level on a quiet stretch of County Wicklow, its presence betrayed only by a dry fosse along the northern edge of a private garden. A fosse, in this context, is simply a ditch, usually dug as a boundary or defensive feature, and this one may mark the outer limit of a graveyard that has otherwise disappeared entirely from view. In the 1950s, when an extension was being built onto the adjacent house, bones were reportedly turned up in the soil, which has done nothing to discourage local belief that something considerable once stood here.

The tradition attached to this site is a long one. Kilpoole is held to have been a monastic foundation associated with a Welsh saint known as Pol or Paul, one of those early medieval figures who moved between Wales and Ireland along the Irish Sea routes that connected the two regions long before any formal ecclesiastical structures were in place. The place-name itself preserves the connection. Later, the site passed through the hands of two of the great medieval military-religious orders: first the Knights Templar, and then, after the Templars were suppressed in the early fourteenth century, the Knights Hospitaller, who held it into the sixteenth century. That a modest patch of Wicklow ground should carry the imprint of Welsh monasticism, Templar ownership, and Hospitaller administration is the kind of layering that tends to get smoothed over when nothing remains to look at. About a hundred metres to the east, in Kilpoole Lower, a holy well also dedicated to St Paul keeps the old association alive in a slightly more tangible form.