At Kilcolman in north Cork, a place bearing a name that announces its ecclesiastical origins, the building dedicated to St Colman had left no surface trace whatsoever by 1934, when a researcher named Bowman investigated and found nothing above ground to record. The site sat within a burial ground, the kind of enclosed churchyard that frequently preserves the memory of a vanished structure long after the walls themselves have collapsed or been robbed for building material elsewhere.

What makes the cartographic record here quietly interesting is the gap it reveals. The Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842 and again in 1904, and on neither occasion did the church appear. Only by 1938 had it been marked on the six-inch map, situated within the burial ground. The dedication to St Colman, recorded by the scholar Henry Berry in 1905, points toward one of the more prolific saints in the Irish tradition; there are dozens of saints bearing that name, and Kilcolman, meaning the church of Colman, is a placename found in several Irish counties, each preserving a local variant of the same early Christian memory. Whether the structure here was medieval or earlier, the notes do not say, and the absence of surface remains means the ground itself has kept its own counsel on the matter.