At Cappanaleigh, on a hillock in County Tipperary, the ground slopes away to the south-east, and somewhere beneath the oldest burials in the north-west corner lies whatever remained of a medieval church. No stone of it survives above ground; no architectural fragment, no carved detail, nothing to mark it out. The dead have simply taken back the space.

The church was known as Templeougher, a name that appears on the 1903 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though already with the cautionary note "site of", indicating that by then it had long since disappeared. The "Teampall" element of the name is the Irish word for church, commonly found in placenames across the country where early ecclesiastical sites once stood. By the time the earliest dated headstone was placed here, in 1700, the building was apparently already gone, its north-west corner absorbed into the expanding burial ground. Two eighteenth-century headstones survive in the north-east quadrant, dated 1734 and 1761, and these are among the oldest legible markers remaining. The graveyard has since been extended southward, and most of what a visitor sees today belongs to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The headstones from 1734 and 1761 are worth seeking out in the north-east quadrant, as they represent the site's oldest surviving inscribed stones. The hillock setting gives the place a quiet elevation above the surrounding landscape, which may explain why it was chosen for a church in the first place, though the church itself left nothing behind to confirm that reasoning.