At Ballyvarney in County Kildare, a church once stood in a small plot of woodland, rectangular in plan, roughly fifteen metres from east to west and eight metres from north to south. Today there is nothing to see. The woodland has been cleared, the slope returns to pasture, and no surface traces survive. What remains is the cartographic ghost of a building that has otherwise left almost no mark on the record.

The structure appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, annotated plainly as "Walls of Church", which suggests that even at that date the building had already fallen to rubble or was reduced to foundations. It does not appear on Noble and Keenan's county map of 1752 or on Taylor's map of 1783, though the absence from those smaller-scale county maps need not mean the building did not exist, only that it was not prominent enough, or the site not significant enough, to attract a cartographer's attention. More telling is its appearance on an estate map produced by Brownrigg and Longfield, dating to between 1787 and 1839 and now held in the National Library of Ireland, where it is shown within that same woodland plot. The estate map context hints at a structure that had already passed out of active use and into the kind of marginal, overgrown condition that tends to render buildings invisible to all but the most methodical surveyor. Who built it, what tradition it belonged to, and when it fell remain open questions.