Somewhere in the townland of Glenpatrick in County Waterford, an early church site lies effectively lost. It does not announce itself with ruins, boundary walls, or carved stonework. Nothing is visible at ground level, and even the precise location is uncertain. The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most methodical cartographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland, recorded it simply as a "site of Burial Ground", which itself suggests that by the mid-nineteenth century the physical traces had already been reduced to memory and tradition rather than measurable remains.

The site was later identified as the early church of Aughnacilla by the Reverend Patrick Power in his 1952 study of the placenames of the Decies, the old territorial name for much of County Waterford. Power's work was fundamentally placename scholarship, the kind that reads landscape through the residue of Irish-language names, and Aughnacilla would have carried its own etymological clues about the nature or dedication of what once stood there. What is known of the physical setting is spare but specific: the site lies on level ground to the west of a stream running broadly south to north. That proximity to running water is a recurring feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where monks and clergy favoured well-drained but water-adjacent ground for practical as much as symbolic reasons.