On a steep north-east-facing slope in County Waterford, on a terrace above a holy well and a small north-south stream, there is nothing left to see. That, in itself, is the point. A church once stood here at Ballynevin, and by the 1890s it had already been reduced to a scattering of architectural fragments and a series of earthen mounds, the faint swellings in the ground that often mark where stone walls have collapsed and been absorbed back into the soil over centuries.

When the antiquarian P. Power surveyed the ancient ruined churches of Waterford in 1896, published in the Waterford Archaeological Journal, he noted the fragments and mounds still present on that terrace. By that point the church structure itself had long since vanished above ground, leaving only those residual traces alongside the holy well below. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently associated with early ecclesiastical sites, and this pairing of a now-invisible church with a surviving well is a recognisable pattern: the sacred geography of the well often outlasted the building it once stood beside, continuing to mark a place long after the architecture had gone. What survives at Ballynevin is, in effect, the memory of a site rather than the site itself, held together by topography and the persistence of the well.