What stands in a graveyard near the south bank of the River Liffey in County Kildare is not so much a ruin as the ghost of a ruin, a place whose medieval fabric was consumed not by the usual slow work of weather and neglect, but by deliberate demolition in order to build something else entirely. The Franciscan friary known as New Abbey has effectively been erased twice over, and the building that replaced it has itself since disappeared.

New Abbey was founded in 1486 by Roland FitzEustace for the Observant Franciscans, a reform movement within the Franciscan order that emphasised a stricter return to poverty. FitzEustace was buried here in 1496, and an effigial tomb, a carved memorial slab or chest tomb bearing a sculpted likeness of the deceased, survives on the site. When the friary was suppressed in 1539, its inventory gives a clear picture of a functioning conventual complex: a church and belfry, dormitory, hall, two chambers, a kitchen, a cemetery, and an orchard garden with a small close of eight acres. A year later, in 1540, the church and house were recorded as being in good repair. By 1782, when the antiquarian Austin Cooper visited and sketched the remains, things had changed considerably. He noted that only the choir, refectory, and confessional chapel were still standing, and that a steeple which had formerly occupied the centre of the building had collapsed around 1764. His sketch recorded a long nave and chancel, a large transept, traceried windows in the gable walls, and double ogee-headed windows with square hood-moulds along the south wall of the chancel. Very shortly after Cooper's visit, even those remaining walls were pulled down to provide building material for a new Catholic chapel erected on the same ground. That chapel was itself demolished in 1872 to make way for the present Catholic church, which stands there today alongside the graveyard that has persisted through all of it.