Beneath fields in County Kildare that appear unremarkable from the road, geophysical survey has revealed the ghost of one of the more intriguing early Christian monastic complexes in Ireland. The site at Killeencormac, near Colbinstown, turns out to be ringed by three concentric enclosures, a trivallate arrangement, reaching a maximum diameter of 205 metres. Triple enclosures of this kind, where a series of earthwork or bank-and-ditch boundaries circled a monastic core, are associated with sites of considerable status in early medieval Ireland, and the scale here suggests something far grander than a modest local foundation.

The buried enclosures wrap around an existing burial ground and church site, which sit at the centre of what the survey identified as a much more extensive early Christian monastic settlement. The site had attracted scholarly attention long before modern geophysics entered the picture. As far back as 1860, a proposal was made, later published by Shearman in the 1860s, that Killeencormac might be identified with the Kil-Fine, or Ecclesia Fine, mentioned in various early Lives of St Patrick. That identification carried a further implication: the same sources associate this church with Palladius, the bishop sent to Irish Christians by Pope Celestine in 431, a figure whose activities on the island remain tantalisingly obscure. Whether the identification holds is a matter of ongoing discussion, but the geophysical evidence has given the question new weight, confirming that the visible remains are only a fraction of what once occupied this ground.