The medieval church at Leigh in County Tipperary is that kind of place. It sits on a raised circular platform, a feature that often signals a site of considerable age, and its walls carry the accumulated decisions of centuries: Romanesque carved heads inserted into the masonry, a blocked-up chancel arch now filled by a later window, wall-footings of older, wider churches pressing out beyond the current structure. Watching over one of the doorways, carved into the east impost of a north-wall entrance that reuses Romanesque stonework, is a sheela-na-gig, one of those enigmatic carved female figures found on Irish and British medieval churches whose exact purpose continues to be debated.

The site appears in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302, recorded as 'Burgleth'. By then, several earlier phases of building were already beneath or embedded within the standing fabric. The earliest identifiable element is a masonry church with antae, the projecting end-walls characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical architecture, of which only the north wall and part of the east wall survive. This was followed by a Romanesque phase, then a structure of possible thirteenth-century date identified through excavations carried out by Macalister and Leask between 1945 and 1948, and finally the late medieval building visible today, including a vaulted chancel that had a room above it in the fifteenth century and a garderobe tower, essentially a latrine turret, built against the north wall. The west gable, with its ogee-headed window, was probably added in the sixteenth century. By the Regal Visitation of 1615, the church was already out of use with no curate assigned. A sketch from 1716, however, shows the nave was still roofed, probably with timber boards, and that a cross stood on the west gable. During the excavations, Macalister found a small bronze strip in the chancel floor, possibly a fragment of a shrine, bearing an inscription that reads 'mac cenedic do rig erend', connecting the site to early Irish kingship in ways that remain incompletely understood. Rev. Seymour, visiting in the early 1900s, noted the remains of an enclosing cashel, a dry-stone defensive or ceremonial enclosure, though no trace of it survives today.