That uncertainty is, in itself, the point. A slight rise in the ground on a west-facing slope is the only physical candidate for what was once, apparently, a place of worship, and even the landowner has no knowledge of anything ecclesiastical ever standing there.

The sole surviving evidence is cartographic. On the 11th of May 1824, a surveyor named Patrick Leahy produced a map titled 'A Map of the Coal District near Killenaule', a document concerned primarily with the industrial geography of south Tipperary's coalfields, an area that once sustained small-scale mining activity across the region. Somewhere in the margins of that practical exercise, Leahy marked a church at Shangarry. The map itself is held in the National Library of Ireland. Beyond that single notation, nothing remains above ground; no walls, no grave markers, no trace of enclosure. The natural hillock on which the building supposedly stood has either absorbed the structure entirely or was never much disturbed by it in the first place.

What makes this site quietly absorbing is not what is there but what the gap between the map and the landscape suggests. A building significant enough to record in 1824 has left no impression on either the ground or local memory. Whether it had already fallen by Leahy's time, whether he was recording a ruin or a living building, whether the slight rise in the field is genuinely the spot, none of that can be answered with confidence. It is a place defined almost entirely by its own absence.