That is the situation at Kilbride Glebe in County Kilkenny, where what was once the ancient parochial church of its district has, by the early twentieth century, left scarcely a vestige above ground. The site is still used for burial, and the name itself preserves the memory of a dedication to Saint Brigid, Cill Bhríde being the Irish for Brigid's church, but the building that once stood here has effectively dissolved back into the landscape.

The scholar Hogan, writing in 1860 to 1861, described the chapel of Cill Bhríde as an ancient church and the original parish church of the surrounding area. When a new parish church was eventually established in the nearby town of Callan, Kilbride was demoted to a chapel of ease, a secondary church intended to serve parishioners who lived too far from the main building to attend regularly. That subordinate role may have hastened its decline. By the time Carrigan surveyed the area in 1905, he found no pre-1700 funerary monuments surviving in the graveyard, which suggests that either the older stones were lost or that the burial ground was not heavily used in its earliest centuries. The site sits close to the Kilbride River, which runs roughly east to west about forty metres to the south of the graveyard, and a holy well called Toberbride lies roughly thirty metres to the south-south-east, drawing together the cluster of dedications, a river, a well, a church site, that so often marks an early ecclesiastical presence in the Irish countryside.