But this particular rise of ground, measuring roughly eleven metres long and less than a metre high, was once believed to offer protection against plague. People drove their cattle here and sheltered alongside them, convinced that the sanctity of the old church that had once stood on the spot would keep the infection at bay.

The church in question was known as Teampull San Sionáin, and by the 1840s it had already long since disappeared. When Ordnance Survey officers were gathering local knowledge for their letters, the records that would document Ireland's landscape and placenames in extraordinary detail, they found only traces of foundation stones visible near a standing cross. The mound that survives today, oriented on a north-south axis and sitting about twenty metres south-west of that cross, is thought to represent what remains of the structure. The belief recorded at the time, that the church grounds conferred immunity during a great pestilence in the neighbourhood, was already being spoken of as a memory from an earlier age, with no date attached to the outbreak or the flight of people and animals to this elevated field. The site sits within a cluster of related features: a holy well lies roughly 250 metres to the north-west, and the remains of a castle a little further north, suggesting this was once a locally significant landscape with religious, defensive, and communal dimensions layered together across centuries.