At the north-western base of Croughaun Hill in County Waterford, there is a church and its surrounding enclosure that exist more in memory than in the landscape itself. The circular enclosure, the kind of boundary wall or earthwork that early medieval communities built around sacred sites to separate them from the secular world beyond, is no longer visible at ground level. The pasture that covers the site has swallowed it entirely, leaving only the knowledge that something was once deliberately set apart here.

The existence of the enclosure was recorded by the Reverend P. Power in his study of the placenames of the Decies, published in its second edition by Cork University Press in 1952. Power's work drew on the deep relationship between place-names and the religious and social geography of early Christian Ireland, and his noting of this site places it within a wider pattern of ecclesiastical enclosures found across the country, many of them associated with early monastic or parish foundations. What survives at Knockaturnory is not stone or earthwork but local memory, the kind of knowledge passed between generations that outlasts the physical evidence by centuries. That the enclosure is still remembered locally, even as the ground shows nothing, is itself a small, quietly significant fact.