Somewhere beneath a thick coat of ivy on a gentle east-facing ridge in County Waterford, a double belfry sits above a west gable that most passing visitors would never recognise as a building at all. The ruin at Killure is so thoroughly engulfed by vegetation that its lancet windows, at least six of them, are blocked and invisible, and the destroyed doorway in the south wall has vanished entirely beneath the growth. What remains is a 13th-century shell measuring roughly fifteen metres by six and a half internally, its north and south walls largely intact but effectively sealed inside a living green shroud.

The site has a complicated institutional history that predates its ruined state by several centuries. Although a preceptory of the Knights Templars at Killure is thought to have passed to the Knights Hospitaller after the suppression of the Templars in 1312, it is likely that the Hospitallers, a religious and military order that ran hospitals and provided armed escorts for pilgrims, were connected with the site from the outset. A Brother Hughes is recorded as Preceptor there in 1300, though references to any Preceptors cease after 1347, suggesting the house had declined in significance well before the wider Dissolution of the monasteries. By the time of the Suppression in 1541, the property had already been farmed out, meaning leased to a lay tenant rather than maintained as an active religious house. The church itself continued in use as the parish church of Killure for a time, but by 1615 it was already described as being in ruins.

A further curiosity lies about forty metres to the south of the church, where a short section of wall, roughly 3.6 metres long and around four metres high, contains a buried arch on its south face. Slight earthen scarps run northward from this wall toward the church and westward for a similar distance, and these may represent the boundary of the original ecclesiastical precinct, now reduced to low grassy ridges. When the antiquarian John O'Donovan examined the site around 1840, he interpreted this southern wall as a separate building rather than a boundary feature, a question that remains unresolved.