That is more or less the situation at Glenville in County Limerick, where a rectangular enclosure measuring roughly 48 metres north to south and 52 metres east to west contains a Church of Ireland building and the layered memory of something considerably older beneath it.

The church stands in the northern quadrant of the graveyard and was erected around 1826 on the site of the medieval church of Rathronan. What makes the history here slightly vertiginous is the account given in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840, which noted that the ancient church of Rathronan had "long since disappeared" by that point, but crucially, the building pulled down to make way for the 1826 structure was not itself medieval. It was, in the words recorded at the time, "not many half centuries old," meaning at least one intermediate church had come and gone between the original medieval foundation and the building that visitors see today. So the site carries three distinct phases of Christian use, and probably more if the enclosure itself is older than any of them, which rectangular graveyard boundaries in Ireland often suggest.

The site sits within a graveyard that retains its roughly rectangular shape, which can be appreciated most clearly from above; aerial photographs taken in March 2006 by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland give a sense of its proportions and layout. At ground level, the church and enclosure are accessible in the ordinary way, and there is no particular season that transforms the experience. What rewards attention is the ground itself and the relationship between the nineteenth-century building and the much older boundary that frames it, a boundary that predates the 1826 church and the unnamed predecessor it replaced, and possibly the medieval church of Rathronan before that.