At the crest of an east-facing slope in County Waterford, a circular graveyard marks the site of the old parish church of Ballylaneen. The curious thing is that there is no church here at all, not even the kind of fragmentary gable or tumbled wall that usually anchors these old ecclesiastical enclosures. The sixty-metre circle of drystone walling, between one and one-point-seven metres wide and rising to about one-point-three metres in places, encloses what is essentially a field, with a low scatter of cairn material towards the south-east of the centre measuring roughly five-and-a-half metres by three. No burial markers are visible, and the ground gives no obvious sign of the building that once stood within it.

The evidence that a church existed here at all comes largely from what was taken away. A baptismal font, the kind of carved stone basin used to hold water for christenings, was at some point removed from this site and relocated to Ballylaneen graveyard, a working burial ground about six hundred metres to the north-east. O'Flanagan, writing in 1929, considered it probable that the font originated here, and Power, citing the site as far back as 1896, recorded it as the parish church. The circular form of the enclosure is itself suggestive of considerable age; in Ireland, curvilinear ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind are often associated with early medieval foundations, though no specific dating evidence is mentioned for this site. What remains is effectively a boundary without its contents, a defined sacred space from which almost everything identifiable has vanished or been moved on.