Somewhere in a working farmyard in County Kildare, the ground holds the memory of a church that no longer exists above it. There are no walls, no visible outline, no trace that anything ecclesiastical ever occupied the spot, and yet local tradition has long identified the location as the site of Russellstown church and its associated graveyard. What survives, just barely, is a stone font and two architectural fragments, presumed to have come from the building itself, now preserved amid the practical business of a modern farm.

The Ordnance Survey's first edition map, published in 1839, offers the only cartographic glimpse of the structure. It shows an unroofed rectangular building at the site, estimated at roughly sixteen metres along its east-northeast to west-southwest axis and around eight metres across, though even at that point the building was evidently already a ruin open to the sky. Curiously, the church was never named on any edition of the OS six-inch maps, which makes the local knowledge of its existence all the more significant as a form of record-keeping in itself. According to local information, the church was levelled sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when many smaller and already-ruinous medieval and post-medieval ecclesiastical sites in rural Ireland were cleared to make way for agricultural use. The font that survives is a baptismal basin, typically a carved stone vessel used to hold water for the sacrament of baptism, and its continued presence at the site, along with the two architectural fragments, suggests the stones were not entirely dispersed when the building came down.