At the junction of Abbey Street and Canal/Basin Street in Naas, there is nothing to suggest that a Dominican friary once stood nearby. No walls, no arches, no worn stonework. The ground gives nothing away, and the street names are the closest thing to a clue that a religious community may once have occupied this corner of the town.

The Dominicans had an earlier friary in Naas, situated just to the north-west of the town's motte, the raised earthen mound that was a feature of Norman settlement in Ireland. Sometime in the seventeenth century, according to Bradley et al. writing in 1986, the community may have relocated roughly 250 metres to the south-south-east, to the site near the present junction of Abbey Street and Canal/Basin Street. The move, if it happened, left no visible trace above ground. What archaeology did eventually find, during testing carried out in 1995 under licence number 95E0042, was a probable graveyard immediately to the east of the presumed friary location. A graveyard without a visible church, on a site without confirmed foundations, associated with a community whose relocation is itself framed as a possibility rather than a certainty: the site accumulates uncertainty at every level, which is perhaps what makes it quietly compelling.