In a graveyard in County Kildare, there is a church that no longer exists in any form visible to the eye. Not ruined, not partially standing, but gone entirely, cleared away to the very foundations at some point before living memory. By 1985, the ground showed no surface trace of it whatsoever, leaving only the surrounding burial ground as evidence that a place of worship once stood here.

What the church looked like before its disappearance can only be inferred obliquely. Writing between 1899 and 1902, a commentator named Sherlock noted its architectural similarity to the medieval churches at Bodenstown and Kerdiffstown, both also in County Kildare, which at least suggests it shared something of their modest stone character. More intriguing is the local tradition, passed on by the landowner in 1985, that the building once belonged to the Order of St John of Jerusalem, the crusading military order also known as the Hospitallers, who held considerable property across medieval Ireland. A formal record compiled in 2002 states bluntly that the old parochial church of Sherlockstown had been entirely cleared away from the foundation, without explaining when or by whom.

What remains is a graveyard, and the graveyard itself carries the site's designation. The church is recorded not as a standing structure or even a ruin, but as an absence within it, a place defined almost entirely by what is no longer there.