At Tearmann Caithreach in County Mayo, tradition holds that a church once stood at the highest point of an elevated, densely grave-covered site, yet today there is nothing visible above ground to confirm it. The building has, in effect, been reclaimed by the hillside and the dead.

The site does have a paper trail, of a kind. Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 label it simply as 'Church', while the 1921 revision had downgraded it to 'Church (in Ruins)', suggesting that within those intervening decades the structure was collapsing into illegibility. By the time the antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited and wrote up his observations, published in 1912, there was still just enough to describe: parts of the north wall surviving to between three and five feet on a sandy hillock, along with loose stonework that had once belonged to a late fifteenth-century window with an ogee head, that is, a window topped by a double curve tapering to a point, a form common in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture. Also scattered among the graves were fragments of two or three stoups, the small stone basins used to hold holy water at a church entrance. These pieces were not in situ; they were simply lying there, displaced, their original positions long forgotten. Since Westropp's time even those remnants have gone, leaving a graveyard on a rise with no visible trace of the building that gave it its purpose.