A graveyard in Naas that holds the site of a Dominican friary is, on the face of it, not unusual. What makes this one quietly puzzling is the almost total absence of evidence: no buildings survive, and no memorial stone predates 1700. For a religious house of the Dominicans, an order that arrived in Ireland in the thirteenth century and left a visible mark on dozens of Irish towns, that kind of erasure is striking.

The site occupies a roughly sub-rectangular plot, approximately 60 metres on its longer axis running northwest to southeast and around 45 metres across. Within that footprint, the Dominican friary once stood. The Dominicans, also known as the Order of Preachers, typically established themselves in or close to urban centres, and Naas, as a medieval Anglo-Norman town of some significance in Leinster, would have been a natural location. But Bradley and colleagues, writing in 1986, could find no trace of the friary's fabric above ground and no funerary inscription from before 1700. Whether the buildings were demolished, robbed for stone, or simply collapsed over centuries, nothing legible in the landscape now marks the friary's former presence.