Settlement deserted

Lea Castle and the old churchyard still stand in low-lying County Laois fields, but the medieval town between them has vanished into soil, water and forgetfulness. It was no ghost story of sudden abandonment; it was a place whose ground kept giving back what people tried to take from it. Fields, ditches, a castle, a churchyard, a tree that once measured thirty-three feet around: all of it belongs to the same story of taking and losing. What is gone is not far away. It is under the grass, mixed into the drainage, buried in the ordinary motion of the land.