Walk the ground today and there is nothing to see; no foundation stones, no earthworks, no residual masonry. The building has been mapped, catalogued, and assigned a monument number, yet at ground level it has effectively vanished. That absence is itself the curiosity.

Emly was once a place of considerable ecclesiastical importance, home to a cathedral associated with St. Ailbe, one of the early Irish saints said to have preceded Patrick in bringing Christianity to Munster. The graveyard still contains the site of that cathedral, and St. Ailbe's Well survives nearby, a holy well being a spring or water source venerated for its association with a saint or believed to have healing properties. The church recorded on the OS map lay immediately south of the well and east of the cathedral site. Its exact identity is uncertain. It may have been a medieval structure assembled from stone taken out of the cathedral fabric, or it may be the same building as a new cathedral constructed on the site in 1827. That later building had a short life. By 1877 it had been entirely dismantled, and according to O'Dwyer and O'Dwyer, the stones were carted away and reused in the construction of a church at Monard. Whether the mapped church and the demolished 1827 cathedral are one and the same, or two separate phases of building, remains unresolved. What is clear is that the stone itself did not disappear; it simply moved, leaving the graveyard without a trace of what once stood there.