Celbridge Abbey, on the banks of the Liffey in County Kildare, is a house with a layered past that its current appearance only partly reveals. Beneath the fabric of the building that stands today lies the ghost of an earlier structure dating to the late seventeenth century, and there is a possibility that some of that original material was never fully swept away but absorbed quietly into later phases of construction.

The significance of this is architectural as much as historical. When later builders worked on the site, common practice in Ireland meant reusing sound stonework, incorporating earlier walls into new plans, or simply building upward from existing foundations. If that is what happened here, then the present building is not simply a replacement for what came before but a kind of accumulation, carrying within it the bones of a house that predates it by generations. Scholars including Killanin and Duignan, writing in 1967, and Bence-Jones in 1978, have noted the building's considerable significance to the architectural heritage of County Kildare, and its archaeological importance derives precisely from this question of what may survive from that earlier phase.