The medieval church dedicated to the Holy Cross at Church Hill, Grange, had already been reduced to a label on the map, marked simply as 'Site of Church' at the western end of a triangular graveyard. The building itself had been dismantled a dozen or so years earlier, its stones carted a short distance north to construct a new Roman Catholic chapel. The surveyors noted, with some regret, that there was 'scarcely any trace of a Church tho' a good part of the walls were up twelve years ago, when it was pulled down to built the R.C. chapel with the materials.'

The new chapel at Grange was erected in 1826, built under the direction of the Reverend Edmond Kavanagh, Parish Priest, with the medieval fabric of Holy Cross providing much of its raw material. The architect James G. Robertson later described how the south wall of the old church had for some time served as a boundary between the avenue leading to the chapel door and the graveyard beside it, its foundations still traceable underfoot. More significantly, Robertson found that the builders had not entirely erased what they had demolished: a portion of the original doorway and a stoup, a small stone basin once used to hold holy water, had been incorporated into the gable end of the new building facing the road. Meanwhile, pressed against the exterior of the old south wall, there survived an altar tomb commissioned by a woman identified as Madame Purcell, erected more than two hundred and forty years before Robertson's time in memory of her husband, Richard Comerford of Ballybur. The result is a layered, slightly unsettling palimpsest: a church whose destruction financed its own successor, with fragments of the original lodged, almost incidentally, within the walls of the building that replaced it.