Somewhere beneath a working farmyard in County Kildare, a church and its graveyard have vanished so completely that no edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps ever recorded them. The ground gives nothing away. No headstones break the surface, no wall stumps or foundation lines are visible, and without local knowledge there would be no reason to suspect that anything lay here at all.

The site was identified by the Athy Cemeteries Committee as the location of Russellstown church and its associated burial ground. The fact that it escaped the OS mapping process entirely makes it an unusual case; the six-inch surveys, carried out from the 1830s onwards, were thorough enough to capture even fragmentary ruins across much of Ireland, so an absence from all editions suggests the levelling of the church happened early, or that what remained was too slight to warrant notation. A nineteenth-century graveslab now held in St. Michael's Cemetery in Athy is believed, on the basis of local knowledge passed on by M. Donovan, to have been removed from Russellstown. Its relocation to a town cemetery is a reminder of how frequently the contents of abandoned rural burial grounds were dispersed once a site fell out of use. Three physical remnants do survive on the farmyard itself: a font and two architectural fragments, presumably salvaged or simply left in place when the church was demolished. A font in this context would have been a stone basin used for baptismal water, sometimes a freestanding fixture and sometimes set into the fabric of a church wall.

The surviving fragments are at the site itself, within a working farmyard, so there is nothing here in the way of a formal visitor access point. The interest lies less in what can be seen than in the gap between what is known to have existed and what the landscape now shows, which is nothing at all.