Or rather, there was. By the time anyone looked closely enough to record what remained, the church had gone, the graveyard had gone, and even the ground that might once have held them offered nothing conclusive. What survives is the description, not the place itself.

The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1838, those meticulous field accounts compiled as surveyors moved across Ireland mapping and noting everything worth noting, recorded a graveyard here in which a small old church dedicated to Saint Mac Duach had stood. Mac Duach, also known as Colman Mac Duagh, was a sixth-century Irish saint most closely associated with the Burren in County Galway, where the monastic settlement of Kilmacduagh near Gort still bears his name. A dedication to him this far into Mayo would not be unusual, given the way early Christian communities and their patron saints spread outward from founding sites across the west of Ireland. But whatever physical trace that dedication left in this particular corner of Mayo had already disappeared before the nineteenth century was out. When the site was examined, no evidence of a church or graveyard could be found. The rocky terrain itself may have absorbed or obscured what little remained, or the structures may simply have been too modest and too old to leave any mark that time chose to preserve.