At Kilmacomb, on a south-facing slope in County Waterford, a parish church still stands, but the ground around it tells a quieter, more puzzling story. The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a graveyard enclosing the church, roughly 30 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, a modest but clearly defined space. On the ground today, no physical trace of burial survives. No headstones, no enclosure, no obvious earthwork to suggest the dead were ever laid here in any number.

The parish church itself remains, so the site was not entirely abandoned or forgotten. What happened to the graveyard is less clear. It may have fallen out of use gradually, with burials shifting to another location as the community shifted around it. The 1840 mapping was part of the first large-scale systematic survey of Ireland, a project that recorded landscapes and townlands at a level of detail that makes its absences as telling as its inclusions. The fact that the graveyard appears there at all suggests it was a recognised feature at the time, even if it was already fading.