The parish church of Ballyfeard, which once served its community at Ballinluig in County Cork, had not merely fallen into disrepair; it had been erased so completely from the landscape that no physical trace of it remained within the graveyard that still bore its name.

The speed of its disappearance is what makes this site quietly remarkable. Already in ruins by 1615, the church was described less than a century later, in 1704, as being "almost level with the ground", a phrase recorded by Brady in his survey of Irish church records. By the mid-nineteenth century, even that near-ground-level remnant was gone. The sequence of dates tells a particular story about the fate of medieval and early post-medieval parish churches in Ireland, many of which fell out of use following the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were simply left to dissolve back into the earth around them. What survives at Ballinluig today is the graveyard alone, which continued in use long after the building it once surrounded had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense.