On a gently sloping field in County Waterford, somewhere beneath a cereal crop, lies a church that has entirely vanished into the earth. Nothing breaks the surface, no stone, no earthwork, no visible trace of the enclosure that once surrounded it. The site survives only as a cartographic ghost, marked in careful Gothic lettering on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, where a rectangular structure roughly fifteen metres long sits within a subrectangular enclosure defined by field banks measuring approximately fifty-five metres north to south and thirty metres east to west.

The place-name itself carries a small puzzle. Kilmaloo might suggest a connection to St. Molua, a well-known early Irish saint associated with several sites across the country, but the Waterford scholar Reverend P. Power, writing in 1907 in his study of the place names of the Decies, argued against that reading. He interpreted the name instead as meaning "my Lua's church", with the "ma" element being an affectionate diminutive rather than a reference to Molua. The Decies was the ancient territory that broadly corresponds to County Waterford, and its place-names preserve, in compressed and sometimes ambiguous form, memories of early Christian communities and their founding figures, many of them now obscure beyond a single syllable embedded in a field name.