That is the situation at Kilnaneave in County Tipperary, where the remains of a rectangular church occupy the north-western corner of a graveyard set on a steep north-east-facing slope. The building's relationship with the hillside is not incidental; it was constructed to accommodate the gradient, and the effect today, even in its poorly preserved state, is of a structure that has always been partly reclaimed by the earth around it.

The church was already old enough by the mid-seventeenth century to merit a note in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which recorded it simply as a standing church, suggesting it was still at least partially intact at that point. What survives now is considerably less legible. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of the great topographical documentation of Ireland, noted that a doorway had existed in the western end of the northern wall, its frame worked from chiselled limestone, the careful dressing of the stone hinting at a building of some deliberate craftsmanship in its time. That doorway, like much else at the site, is no longer clearly visible, but the observation preserves a small detail of how the church was once entered and finished.