This roughly rectangular enclosure in County Kilkenny, set on raised ground and enclosed by a stone wall, sits just forty metres north of the Kilbride River, with the holy well known as Toberbride a short distance to the south-southeast. The old Callan-Clonmel road once ran along its eastern edge before being bypassed, lending the site the slightly adrift quality of a place the modern world has rerouted itself around.

The church associated with this ground, known in Irish as Cill-Bhrighde, the church of Brigid, was described in the 1860s by Hogan as the ancient parochial church of the district. When the parish centre shifted to Callan, Kilbride was reduced to a chapel of ease, a subordinate church serving outlying parishioners who could not conveniently reach the main parish church. The building itself has since vanished entirely from the surface; nothing remains visible at ground level. What the site does preserve, more vividly than stone, is the memory of the pattern that was held here on St Brigid's feast day, the first of February, until the early nineteenth century. A pattern, in Irish tradition, was a local religious gathering combining prayer, pilgrimage, and communal ritual, typically centred on a saint's well or sacred site. As recorded by Carrigan in 1905, people came from miles around in their best clothes. The wealthier attendees brought baskets of bread and butter, called manchaine or bread of lamentation, to distribute among the poor, who in return prayed for the donors' dead. Graves were dressed with box, laurel, and whatever flowers could be found in early February. The mná caointe, or keening women, sang the death-song. And at the grave of any young woman recently buried, mourners placed the craobh maighdionais, the Branch of Virginity, a decorated branch hung with white ribbons, as a mark of her unmarried state.

The holy well, Toberbride, remains a fixed point in this landscape, drawing together the river, the raised burial ground, and the long-vanished church into a cluster of sacred geography that the pattern, for as long as it lasted, held in active relation to one another.