At Ballynabortagh in County Cork, within the outline of an old ecclesiastical enclosure, a church once stood, then a chapel, then a cairn marking the memory of both, and now there is nothing visible at all. No walls, no burial mounds, no obvious sign that this was ever a consecrated place. What survives is mainly the knowledge that something has vanished.

When the antiquarian John Windele visited in 1844, he found the site already reduced. He recorded an unbaptised burial ground, a feature associated in Irish tradition with children who died before baptism, who were excluded from consecrated ground and interred instead at liminal spots such as old ruined churches or boundary edges. He also found a square compartment enclosing a cairn or mound that, in his account as relayed by O'Donoghue writing in 1914, marked the position of the ancient church. By that point the building had already slipped out of active use; O'Donoghue noted it had served as a chapel more than three generations before his writing, placing its abandonment somewhere in the late eighteenth or very early nineteenth century. Since Windele's visit even those remnants have disappeared, the cairn gone, the burial ground no longer traceable on the ground.

What does remain, to the south-east of the enclosure, is a bullaun stone. These are boulders or bedrock surfaces bearing one or more rounded depressions, ground out deliberately, and they appear frequently in association with early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland. Their precise function is debated, but they are among the most durable markers of early Christian, and sometimes pre-Christian, activity in the landscape. That the bullaun survives while the church, the cairn, and the graves have all dissolved into the field says something about what endures and what does not.