The rubble was put there deliberately in 1813, when restorers spread the debris of their own renovation works across what had been the original encaustic floor of Duiske Abbey, burying sculptures, monuments, and decorated inlaid glazed tiles in Lombardic script that had survived the better part of six centuries. The church above is still in use. The floor below remains unrestored.

Duiske, formally known as the abbey of the valley of the Holy Redeemer, was founded in 1204 by William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke and Leinster, for monks who had come from the Cistercian Abbey of Stanley in Wiltshire. They had moved twice already, trying sites at Lough Meran near Kilkenny and at Annamult, before settling in the bend where the Duiske River meets the Barrow on its northern bank. The church they eventually built was the largest Cistercian church in Ireland, measuring 64.6 metres in length and 36.5 metres across the transepts, constructed broadly between 1212 and 1240 in the Early English style, with stiff-leaf capitals, dog-tooth ornament, and banded shafts. The Cistercians were disciplined builders but also commercially minded ones; Duiske funded much of its early expansion through sheep farming and wool sales, only to end the thirteenth century deeply in debt to the Ricciardi of Lucca, Italian bankers to whom the monks had forward-sold their wool clip. Over the following two centuries the abbey weathered sieges, parliamentary restrictions barring Irish monks from profession, a papal inquiry prompted by the conduct of James Butler, the 4th Earl of Ormond, and the formal dissolution of March 1536, after which the last abbot was pensioned off at ten pounds a year. The property passed to the 9th Earl of Ormond in 1538, and eventually to the family of James Agar in 1703, though abbots appear to have continued receiving papal appointment well into the late seventeenth century. In 1774 the octagonal crossing-tower collapsed, taking the chancel vaulting with it. By the end of the nineteenth century the monastic ranges were described as occupied by a stable, a corn-store, and a constabulary drill ground, with jackdaws nesting in what had been the library.

The church was extensively restored between 1974 and 1983 and remains an active parish church. Excavations in the north transept uncovered sections of the original patterned tile floor still in place, plain and decorated glazed tiles alongside the lettered Lombardic examples, a rare survival from the thirteenth century. The original floor level of the nave was not reinstated during the modern restoration, meaning that much of what was buried in 1813 likely remains exactly where it was left.