Somewhere in the graveyard at Nurney, Co. Kildare, a medieval church has been almost entirely reclaimed by ivy. What remains is just enough to read the building's bones: the east gable wall still stands, along with short stubs of the north and south sidewalls, all built from roughly coursed limestone boulders bedded in mortar. At the west end, the ground itself tells part of the story, a pronounced external scarp about 1.2 metres high marking where the wall once rose. The structure measured roughly 15 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south, modest dimensions that were typical of a rural parish church. Two narrow windows survive in the east gable, their inward-splaying reveals, wider on the inside than the outside, a design intended to funnel light into the interior while minimising the opening exposed to the weather.

The church ruins are not the only medieval layer here. In 2002, archaeological test-trenching was carried out on land immediately south and west of the church and graveyard, ahead of a proposed housing development. Two of the trenches produced finds of particular interest. The southernmost trench revealed traces of a possible curvilinear ditch, a type of boundary feature often associated with early ecclesiastical enclosures, and a sherd of local, unglazed medieval cooking ware was recovered from its surface. Further east, a third trench uncovered eight parallel north-to-south furrows. Medieval pottery found at the base of two of these furrows points to the possibility that the area once formed part of a medieval field system, the kind of ridge-and-furrow cultivation landscape that has largely disappeared from the Irish countryside. Taken together, the pottery, the ditch, and the furrows suggest that the ground around Nurney church was actively worked and organised during the medieval period, even if the details of who farmed it and when remain unclear.