To the south of Galbally in County Limerick, a field holds what was once, in all probability, a place of considerable ecclesiastical significance, and the only evidence that anything was ever there is a notation on an old Ordnance Survey map and the memory preserved in a placename: Killanellug, or Killenellig, depending on which source you consult.

The site was recorded in the Urban Survey of Limerick compiled by Bradley and colleagues in 1989, which noted that Killenellig functioned as a prebend of the diocese of Emly. A prebend was an endowment attached to a cathedral chapter, granting a canon or senior clergyman an income from the revenues of a specific church or landholding. The fact that this site held such a status within Emly, one of the oldest episcopal sees in Ireland, led the survey's authors to suggest it may originally have been an Early Christian church site of some importance. Emly's diocese has roots stretching back to the early medieval period, associated with Saint Ailbe, and churches within its orbit often had long histories before the Norman reorganisation of the Irish church in the twelfth century brought more formal diocesan structures into place.

Today, a visitor arriving at Ardrahin would find no standing walls, no carved stonework, no visible earthworks. The church site recorded on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map has left nothing on the surface that can be seen or touched. What remains is essentially cartographic and documentary, preserved in the survey record compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2019. For anyone interested in the early medieval church in Munster, the absence itself is worth noting: sites like this one are scattered across the Irish countryside, their significance legible only through diocesan records and placename evidence, the physical fabric long since returned to the soil.