Some places persist in memory long after the ground has forgotten them entirely. On the northern slope of a shallow valley in County Kildare, where a small river runs westward through what is now the village of Walterstown, local tradition has long preserved the idea that a nunnery once stood here. By 1837, when an Ordnance Survey correspondent recorded the belief, there was already nothing to see. The note, preserved in O'Conor's Ordnance Survey Letter, is candid about the situation: the spot was pointed out by locals, but no remains were observable, and only a very small portion of the ground where the walls had stood was said not to have been dug over or tilled.

The site sits in a curious kind of historical shadow. It does not appear in Gwynn and Hadcock's authoritative 1970 survey of Irish medieval religious houses, which raises the possibility that the nunnery, if it existed, left too faint a documentary trace to be confirmed, or that the tradition attached itself to the wrong kind of structure altogether. What complicates the picture is that in 1967, burials were uncovered in the vicinity, suggesting that at some point the area was used for formal interment, a detail consistent with a religious establishment but not conclusive on its own. When archaeological trial-trenching was carried out in 1987 ahead of a private development immediately south of the presumed location, excavators found no structures, deposits, or finds of any archaeological significance.

The result is a site that exists almost entirely as an absence. Modern housing has grown up to the west and north-west, and the gentle valley landscape gives no indication that anything lies beneath or ever did. What remains is the local memory recorded in 1837, the burials that surfaced decades later, and a question that the ground has so far declined to answer.