Set in a natural hollow above the Avoca river, the site drops steeply to the west, but the ground itself offers nothing to confirm what tradition insists once stood here. No masonry, no earthwork, no visible outline remains of the foundation.

What makes the absence more arresting is the name attached to it. According to Liam Price, writing in 1967, this was a site associated with Palladius, the bishop sent to Ireland by Pope Celestine in 431 AD, before Patrick is said to have arrived. Palladius is a figure who tends to be eclipsed in the popular telling of Irish Christian history, yet the historical record suggests he was the first Christian minister formally sent to an already partially Christian population in Ireland. Whether any physical foundation here ever bore his name is now impossible to verify; the hollow at Tigroney keeps that information to itself. A holy well called Tobernacla does survive in a nearby rock outcrop and is marked on both editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced during the nineteenth century. Holy wells, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites, frequently outlast the buildings they once accompanied, and Tobernacla may be the most tangible thread connecting this quiet hollow to whatever was once believed to have happened here.