It is not ruined, not overgrown, not submerged in a lake. It is simply lost, its precise location unrecorded, leaving historians with a set of documentary facts and no ground to pin them to.

What the documents do tell us is this. According to Adams, writing in 1881, a church was established at Balcurris by St. Folloman in the sixth century. It was dedicated to St. Mac Tail, who died in 548, one of the lesser-known figures of the early Irish church, whose name appears in a handful of sources but whose cult never spread far. The church's existence drifts quietly through the early medieval period until 1167, when Gilbert de Nugent granted it to the Abbey of the Virgin Mary. Such grants were fairly common in the Norman period, when newly arrived lords consolidated their standing by attaching local religious sites to established continental or Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical institutions. What happened to the building after that point is not recorded in the available notes, and at some stage it passed entirely out of the documentary and physical record.

There is nothing to visit here in the conventional sense, which is part of what makes the site worth knowing about. Balcurris is a residential area of Ballymun in north Dublin, an unlikely landscape for early medieval ecclesiastical archaeology, and the church, if any trace of it survives at all, lies somewhere beneath it. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the Irish sites database in August 2011, with the blunt note that the exact location of the monument is unknown. For anyone interested in the texture of Irish place history, that lacuna is itself the point: a sixth-century foundation, a Norman land grant, a saint's dedication, and then silence, all compressed into a few square kilometres of modern suburban Dublin.