Not fallen, not buried under centuries of accumulation, just absent, leaving the ruined parish church of Tikillin open to the sky and the surrounding scrub on one side as though the building never quite finished deciding what shape it wanted to be. What remains sits within a raised rectangular graveyard, the kind of slightly elevated enclosure, defined here by low earthen scarps and a retaining wall to the north, that often signals a site with a long history of use. The foundations themselves are fragmentary and grass-covered, the masonry walls surviving to no more than a metre in height, the whole footprint measuring roughly fifteen and a half metres east to west and under seven metres north to south.

By the early seventeenth century, the church had already passed out of any straightforward ecclesiastical arrangement. A visitation carried out in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, recorded that the church was impropriate to Henry Wallop, meaning that the tithes and revenues attached to the living had been assigned to a lay landowner rather than a clergyman. The arrangement was common enough in post-Reformation Ireland, where ecclesiastical income frequently ended up in the hands of powerful families, sometimes leaving parishes without a functioning priest. Ram's record does not give the name of any priest associated with Tikillin, and says nothing about the state of the building itself, which leaves open the question of whether the church was in use, falling apart, or already beyond repair at that point. The site occupies a low spur of land between two small stream valleys, with the River Slaney running roughly two hundred metres to the south-west, placing it within a landscape that would have oriented its medieval community towards the river and the routes it defined.