Not ruined in any dramatic sense, not collapsed into a romantic scatter of dressed stone, but simply gone, absorbed back into the ground to the point where no visible surface trace remains today. The graveyard itself continues in use, enclosed by a stone wall and entered from the east, its unusual triangular outline measuring roughly 70 metres east to west and 120 metres north to south. That distinctive shape, combined with the invisible architecture at its centre, gives the site a quietly disorienting quality.

The vanished building is identified as Templemary Church, and its former presence is known primarily through documentary rather than physical evidence. When the Ordnance Survey recorded the area in 1840, the church remains were described as still traceable, and the 1842 six-inch OS map depicts a rectangular structure of approximately 12 metres by 7 metres, oriented roughly west-south-west to east-north-east. Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, referred to the site as containing the ruins of an ancient church or chapel, suggesting that even then it was more a memory than a standing structure. By the early twentieth century, James Grove White was gathering the same references into his survey of Cork antiquities, but the physical remains had by that point all but disappeared. The earliest headstone noted in the graveyard dates to 1761, placing it in the same era when the church would already have been in a very advanced state of decay.