In a field in Laurencetown South, County Limerick, a medieval church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary has vanished so completely that no surface remains are visible at all. The site is known variously as Rossard Church or Laurencetown Church, and its disappearance from the landscape is almost total, leaving only the documentary record and the faint ghost of a cartographic marking to confirm it was ever there.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, noted what little could be established about the site at that time: a trace of the church survived and was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1840, though even that outline has since been lost to the ground. The settlement associated with the church appears in the historical record as early as 1296, in the Plea Rolls, where it is referred to as Nova villa Laurentiston et Effyng, the Latin phrase meaning roughly "new town," suggesting this was once a planned or at least formally recognised medieval settlement. It reappears in the Civil Survey of 1655, indicating the site retained some administrative significance even into the seventeenth century, though by then the Reformation had long since disrupted the older patterns of parish worship that would have sustained such a church.

For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the absence itself is the point. The field in Laurencetown South holds no ruin, no standing wall, no carved stonework to photograph. What survives is the place-name, the documentary trail, and whatever lies beneath the soil. The 1840 Ordnance Survey map, available through the Historical Maps viewer on the OSi website, shows the recorded trace and gives the best sense of where the church once stood. Local fieldwalking or a visit to the Limerick county sites and monuments record would provide further orientation. There is nothing dramatic to greet a visitor here, but for those interested in how thoroughly a medieval community can be erased from a landscape, this quiet Limerick field makes the point with some force.