Somewhere in an overgrown graveyard in County Kildare, a faint ripple of uneven, stony ground is about all that survives of a chapel that once served a medieval community, changed ecclesiastical hands more than once, and was already a ruin by the seventeenth century. There is no standing wall, no arch, no carved stonework; just a disturbance in the earth that may, or may not, mark where the building once stood.

The place carries several names in the historical record, appearing as Gilltown, Kilton, and Inchebrislane interchangeably, which itself hints at the layered and sometimes contradictory nature of medieval land administration in Kildare. In 1192, the settlement was granted along with Brannockstown and Domnachmor to St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. By 1275 the chapel had passed into the orbit of the Cistercian monastery at Baltinglass, an abbey founded in the twelfth century in the Wicklow uplands, and the connection deepened over the following centuries. By 1531 the Baltinglass community maintained a magna grangia here, meaning a substantial monastic grange, essentially a working farm managed directly by the monastery to supply it with food and income. The arrangement placed Gilltown within a wider network of Cistercian agricultural enterprise across Leinster. Whatever the chapel looked like by that point, it did not survive long into the new century. When Archbishop Bulkeley carried out his visitation of the diocese in 1630, a systematic inspection of church properties in the years following the Reformation, he recorded the building simply as "downe". It had been levelled, and nobody had thought it worth rebuilding.