What was once a D-shaped earthen enclosure, roughly 94 metres across its longest axis and planted thickly with larch, was levelled sometime in the 1950s under a Land Project scheme. The reclaimed grassland that replaced it gives no hint that anything stood here at all, yet the layers of use and abandonment compressed into that small patch of County Kilkenny ground are quietly remarkable.

The oldest surviving description comes from Healy, writing between 1874 and 1879, who noted an oval mound to the west of the then-residence at Woodsgift, its interior dense with tall larch and a ruined foundation still traceable at its centre. By the time Carrigan wrote in 1905, local knowledge had attached the ruin to a penal chapel, that is, a place of Catholic worship built during the period when such worship was legally suppressed or severely restricted in Ireland. According to Carrigan, the chapel was erected by a Lieutenant Wood of Woodsgift, roughly 500 yards north of his own house. On Wood's death, the building was converted to use as a stable, and by 1905 only the bare foundations remained, measuring 42 feet long by 20 feet wide, sitting within a low earthen enclosure that people still called "the chapel yard". The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 and its 1900 revision both show the D-shaped enclosure about 250 metres west-southwest of Woodsgift House, though neither map records any chapel, and no cartographic evidence for the building has been found. When someone visited in 1955, the whole feature was described simply as a bank around a grove of trees. Shortly afterwards, even that was gone.

What lingers is the question of how much was absorbed into the landscape before it was erased. The enclosure may have been a tree plantation associated with Woodsgift Demesne that happened to envelope an older, more charged ruin, or the plantation itself may have grown up precisely around and because of the chapel yard. Either way, the relationship between the demesne aesthetics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the remnants of penal-era Catholic worship is an unresolved one, and the flat field that sits there now keeps none of its answers visible.