On an east-facing slope in County Wexford, within what was once a rectangular graveyard roughly a hundred metres wide and sixty metres deep, there is now only pasture. No stonework, no burial markers, no visible indication that anything religious or funerary ever took place here. The Owenduff River runs about a hundred and twenty metres to the east, and that is perhaps the most concrete landmark remaining in the landscape.

By 1615, the parish church of Kilscanlan had already been absorbed administratively into the parish of Old Ross, as recorded during a visitation carried out by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns. Despite this union, a curate named Jacob Prendergast was still attached to the church, and Ram noted that both the church and its chancel were in repair at the time. It is a small but telling detail: a functioning building, tended and staffed, already in the process of being folded into a larger ecclesiastical unit. What happened after that is not recorded here, but by the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1839, the cartographers rendered the church as a faint rectangular outline, approximately fifteen metres east to west and eight metres north to south, and labelled the whole area in gothic lettering as the site of a church, the gothic script being the convention used on early OS maps to signal antiquity or ruin. The graveyard around it was shown as scrub-covered ground, already returning to something wilder than use.