A graveyard in Kildare town sits quietly between two religious buildings in a way that makes it easy to walk past without quite registering what the ground beneath you once supported. Located to the west-northwest of St. Brigid's Cathedral and just south of the modern Carmelite church, it occupies a patch of land that was almost certainly the site of the Carmelite Priory of St Mary, a religious house that has since been levelled entirely, leaving no visible trace above ground.

The modern Carmelite church on the site is not without its own material history. It contains a series of late medieval limestone panels, fragments that survived the disappearance of the earlier priory and now sit embedded within the fabric of a much later building. The Carmelites, a mendicant order who arrived in Ireland during the medieval period, established communities in a number of Irish towns, and Kildare was among them. What remains here is essentially a layered site: a vanished priory, a graveyard that continued in use after the priory was gone, and a modern church that absorbed some of what little survived the intervening centuries.