Most medieval churches in Ireland are accompanied by at least the remnant of a burial ground, even if only a scatter of unmarked stones or a slight rise in the earth. At Kilbline in County Kilkenny, the expected evidence simply does not appear. What is recorded here is, in essence, an absence.

The site sits in what is now a reclaimed field, associated with the remains of a medieval church at Kilbline. The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, shows no graveyard alongside the church, and neither does the later revision carried out between 1899 and 1902. More striking still is the observation made by the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, who noted when describing the church that there was "no trace of graveyard or graves". That a medieval church would have functioned without any associated burial ground seems unlikely; communities across Ireland used the land around their local churches as sacred ground for the dead from early Christian times onwards. The more probable explanation is that whatever graveyard once existed here was absorbed into agricultural use during land reclamation at some point before the nineteenth century, leaving nothing visible by the time anyone thought to look carefully.