Somewhere between the Brickey River and the foot of a rocky hillock in County Waterford, a small ruined church sits in a landscape that has quietly erased some of its own evidence. The graveyard that once flanked this building was still legible on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map published in 1840, yet today not a trace of it remains. The church itself, a compact rectangle measuring roughly seven and three quarter metres by five and three quarter metres, fares slightly better: three of its four walls, the north, east, and west, survive almost to their full height, their modest thickness of sixty-five centimetres suggesting a building that was always functional rather than grand. High in each wall, small windows let in light with a kind of deliberate restraint, and the east gable once held a doorway nearly two and a half metres tall, though this has since been destroyed.

The most intriguing object to have been associated with this church is no longer here at all. A cross-slab bearing a raised ringed cross, thought possibly to have served as an altar stone, was at some point removed to the tower house at Cappagh, several kilometres away. A tower house is a form of fortified residence common in late medieval Ireland, typically a tall, narrow stone structure built by local lords and gentry. The relocation of a liturgical piece to a secular building speaks to the complicated afterlives of rural ecclesiastical sites, where portable stonework was often repurposed rather than left to weather in an unroofed shell. The ruins were noted by the Reverend P. Power in 1898, in his survey of ancient ruined churches across the county, and the site sits within easy sight of Knockmaon tower house, which stands roughly a hundred metres to the north on the same hillock. The two structures, one sacred, one defensive, occupied the same small ridge above the Brickey River, and it is difficult not to read a deliberate proximity into that arrangement.