The church at Drombane in County Kerry offers no such consolation. The building has vanished so completely that nothing of it remains above ground, and what was once a functioning place of worship is now, in the dry language of cartography, merely a "site of." What makes this quietly absorbing is how the maps themselves trace the disappearance. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1844 still recorded "Drombane Church (in ruins)", which suggests that by the mid-nineteenth century walls or fragments were at least present and identifiable. By the time the 1895 edition was surveyed, even those remnants had gone, and the notation shifted to the more final "Drombane Church (site of)", a designation that signals not a place but a memory of one.

The church sat within the south-eastern half of an ecclesiastical enclosure, a term referring to the roughly circular or oval boundary, often a raised earthen bank or stone wall, that historically demarcated sacred ground in early Irish Christianity. Such enclosures frequently predate the churches built within them by centuries, suggesting long continuity of use at a single sacred spot. At Drombane, that enclosure survives as a separate recorded monument, even as the church it once contained has slipped entirely below the surface. Whether the building was robbed out for building stone, as was common across rural Kerry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or simply collapsed and was gradually absorbed into the ground, the notes do not say. What remains is a field, an enclosure, and the outline of something that two Victorian-era maps tried and ultimately failed to pin down.