A graveyard that slowly disappears into its own landscape is unusual enough, but the site at Moortown in County Kildare takes that quality a step further. What was once a large, unenclosed burial ground, roughly 70 metres by 50 metres in extent, appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 marked only by a broken line, suggesting even then that its boundaries were uncertain or barely legible on the ground. By the time revised mapping was produced in the late 1930s, the northern portion had been enclosed, while the southern section had acquired a partial boundary of a different kind and a name of its own: Rath Nua.

Rath Nua, meaning "new fort" in Irish, sits on a moderate north-facing pasture slope and seems to have served as more than a simple field division. In 1972, the interior was recorded as containing the traces of a large rectangular structure measuring approximately 21 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south, tentatively identified as a church, positioned to the north of centre within the enclosure. A fosse, in this context, is a broad ditch used to define or defend an enclosed area, and the suggestion is that one once ringed this southern portion of the site. By 1986, however, nothing of either the enclosure or the possible church could be seen at ground level. The site had effectively vanished from the surface of the field. What brought it back into focus, at least in outline, was an aerial photograph that revealed a cropmark, the faint difference in crop growth or ground colour that betrays buried features below the soil, tracing the arc of a broad fosse projecting southward from the wall of the modern graveyard.

The modern graveyard wall, then, may be the only visible remnant of a much older and more complex arrangement of enclosures, burials, and perhaps an ecclesiastical structure that once occupied this quiet Kildare slope. The archaeology beneath the surface almost certainly holds more than the eye can find.