A church once stood here, known as Kilree Church, and around it lay a graveyard. By the time the historian William Carrigan wrote about it in 1905, both had already vanished from living memory.

Carrigan, whose four-volume history of the Diocese of Ossory remains an essential source for the ecclesiastical geography of Kilkenny, placed the church about a quarter of a mile east of the castle, in an area still called the "Church Field" in his day. His description of the graveyard is quietly striking: no enclosing rampart, no visible graves, the whole site overgrown with bushes, and obsolete, as he put it, "time out of mind." The phrase suggests a place that had slipped out of use so long ago that no one could say when. Despite this near-total erasure, the graveyard was still recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, and again on the revision carried out between 1899 and 1902, meaning that cartographers continued to mark what the landscape itself had stopped showing.

Today there is no visible trace of the church at all. The site is one of those places that exists more fully in historical records than in the ground, a name attached to a field, a dot on an old map, and a passage in a century-old book describing something that was already gone.