In a field on the southern edge of the River Suir's floodplain in County Waterford, there is a church that is not there. Nothing breaks the pasture at ground level, no stone, no earthwork, no hollow in the soil, yet the place carries a name and a memory. The site at Kildroughtaun is one of those curious absences that the Irish landscape occasionally throws up, a location where the record of something having existed outlasts any physical trace of it.

What survives instead is a piece of folklore, noted by the Reverend P. Power in 1895, in his study of the ancient ruined churches of Waterford. According to local tradition, the church that once stood here did not fall or decay in the ordinary way. It moved. The story holds that the building relocated itself across the River Suir to a site in County Tipperary on the opposite bank. This kind of tradition, in which a sacred structure migrates of its own accord, is not unique in Irish folklore; churches, holy wells, and stones are occasionally said to have shifted when disturbed or shown disrespect, and the motif usually encodes some older dispute over ownership, patronage, or parish boundaries. Whether that is the explanation here, the notes do not say. What the Suir provides is a natural boundary, the river running west to east, with Waterford to the south and Tipperary to the north, and the lost church sitting roughly 250 metres from its bank.