At Ballynakilly on the east bank of the Behy river in County Kerry, a roofless rectangular church continues to hold the dead within its walls, with grave-markers crowding the interior while further upright slabs, some incised with simple crosses, press close outside. The walls, rubble-built and wrapped in ivy, stand no higher than 1.9 metres at their best, yet the place retains a quiet coherence: an entrance gap still opens towards the western end of the south wall, and a grave-marker inside carries an inscribed date of 1710, evidence that people were still choosing to bury their dead here decades after the structure itself had begun its long decline.

The documentary record of this church stretches back to at least 1576, when a fiant, a type of administrative warrant used under the Tudor administration in Ireland, records the leasing of the rectory of Glanbehie to a Thomas Clinton. By 1615 the vicarage of Glanbehy was described as "waste; voyde", which suggests the parish had effectively ceased to function as an active ecclesiastical unit, though the building was still listed among the parochial churches of the diocese in 1622. A decade later, in 1633, a Thomas Harris served as its incumbent minister, holding the position alongside responsibility for the neighbouring parishes of Cahir and Killinane, with one Edwardus Spring recorded as its patron. Whatever fragile continuity that arrangement represented did not last; by 1756, the parish church was formally noted as being in ruins.

The remains today measure 12.6 metres by 6.2 metres internally, and the walls are around a metre thick throughout. The site is worth approaching slowly: the density of burial within and around the ruined shell is notable, and the low cross-marked slabs outside reward close attention. The Behy river runs nearby to the west.