At the north-western base of Croughaun Hill in County Waterford, a scrub-covered rectangle of low stone walls sits quietly on a gentle slope, its western side open to the elements. Measuring roughly 18 metres by 16 metres, the enclosure is modest enough that a walker might pass it without a second thought. Yet local tradition holds this to be the site of a church, with the original precinct believed to have extended further northward than what survives today. No structural remains and no burials have been found within, which is itself a small puzzle, and the Reverend P. Power, writing in his 1952 study of Waterford placenames, recorded the enclosure as circular rather than rectangular, suggesting either that the site has changed considerably over time or that earlier observers were working from different evidence.

What gives the place a particular quality is the bullaun stone that lies roughly 12 metres north of the enclosure, caught up in tree roots as though the ground is slowly reclaiming it. A bullaun is a boulder or rock with one or more deliberate cup-shaped depressions hollowed into its surface; these stones are found across Ireland and are frequently associated with early ecclesiastical sites, sometimes used for grinding, sometimes thought to have had ritual significance, though their precise function is rarely certain. Local knowledge points to a second bullaun stone somewhere nearby, but it has not been located by surveyors. The combination of a lost or altered enclosure, one confirmed bullaun, one missing bullaun, and no surviving architecture gives Knockaturnory the character of a place that has been quietly forgetting itself for centuries, leaving just enough behind to suggest something was once here that mattered.