The parentheses around the word "Site of" say everything: even by the time the cartographers came through, there was nothing left to draw. Today, a farmhouse converted into a workshop and a cluster of outbuildings occupy the narrow triangular wedge of ground where two roads converge at the foot of a south-west-facing slope. No stone, no foundation line, no outline in the grass suggests that anything religious ever stood here.

The 1838 map places this disappearance in a particular historical moment. The survey was conducted in the years following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, a period when the physical infrastructure of Catholic worship in Ireland was being rebuilt after generations of legal restriction. That a chapel had already vanished from this spot by the time the surveyors arrived suggests it belonged to an earlier and more precarious era, when rural congregations gathered in structures that were modest enough to leave little trace. Mass houses of the penal period were often simple thatched buildings, sometimes little more than a sheltered hollow or a barn, and they could disappear from the landscape within a generation of falling out of use. Whatever stood at Ballyvaltron left no archaeology behind, only a cartographic memory preserved in ink.