At the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary, excavation to the east of the north tower of Cormac's Chapel uncovered a short length of mortared stone wall running beneath the eastern wall of the later cathedral. The wall is gone now, reburied, with no visible trace remaining above ground level. What survives is the interpretation: that this fragmentary masonry represents an earlier church, one that predates the great cathedral that eventually swallowed its memory.

The identification comes from excavation work documented by Hodkinson in 1994, which linked the buried wall to the third and fourth phases of the Rock's graveyard sequence. Cormac's Chapel itself, the Romanesque structure beside which this earlier building apparently stood, was consecrated in 1134 and is among the finest examples of Irish Romanesque architecture surviving anywhere on the island. The cathedral that later rose to the east dates from the thirteenth century. If the buried wall is correctly interpreted, then this nameless earlier church occupied the site during a period when the Rock was already a place of considerable ecclesiastical and political importance, its layers of construction accumulating one over another in ways that archaeology is only slowly unpicking.