Somewhere in the graveyard at Kilrainy, County Kildare, a chapel once stood, and almost nothing of it remains. No wall, no foundation course, no stone set visibly apart from the soil. Its location is known only because nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey mapmakers recorded it to the east of the graveyard's centre, and that cartographic note is now among the few traces the building has left behind.

The site sits within what may be an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that in Ireland often marks the original footprint of an early medieval religious settlement, frequently predating the Norman period. The enclosure at Kilrainy contains both the graveyard and the lost chapel, suggesting the place has been in continuous, if quiet, use across a considerable stretch of time. What the OS 6-inch map recorded across two separate editions has since been absorbed by the earth; aerial photography from 2005 shows the area overgrown with trees, and on the ground the spot is occupied by a dense concentration of burials, the chapel's outline long since erased by the very community that once gathered around it.