The church at Kilcollan, on the northern slope of the Dinin river valley in County Kilkenny, leaves almost nothing at all. There is no visible masonry, no raised ground, no scatter of worked stone. The site is identified by local tradition alone, and even that tradition is thin. The church gave its name to the townland, and then it vanished so completely that the name outlasted any memory of where the building actually stood.

Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan noted that the church "has been so long obliterated, that not even a tradition of its situation has come down." His best guess placed it a few fields east of a local landmark known as the Pigeon House, in an area called the Old Meadow. That same ground, he suggested, had also held Kilcollan castle and a number of other ancient structures, all of them "uprooted from the foundations many years ago." The phrase is a blunt one, and it points to the kind of deliberate clearance that happened across rural Ireland when agricultural improvement took priority over whatever was underfoot. Stone was reused, ground was levelled, and the record of what had been there dissolved into the field system around it. What Carrigan was working from in 1905 was already fragmentary; what survives now is less still, a placename and a general area of rolling grassland along the valley floor.