The site of an early medieval church in County Cork has left no visible surface trace whatsoever; no stone, no earthwork, no outline in the grass. A place of worship old enough to have given its name to an entire parish has been completely swallowed by the landscape, leaving only documents and old maps to confirm it ever existed.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a rectangular church set within a circular enclosure, the kind of roughly circular churchyard boundary that is a common indicator of early Christian ecclesiastical sites in Ireland. By the time that map was made, however, the enclosure was already a memory in the making; it has since been levelled entirely. A much earlier account, recorded by Lunham in 1909 but apparently describing conditions around 1700, catches the church at an intermediate stage of ruin: almost fifty feet long, with half its walls already fallen, an arched partition still running through its middle, a ditch marking the churchyard boundary, and, notably, no sign of any graves. That last detail is quietly puzzling. The church was anciently the parish church of St. Michael's, and in Irish it was known as Teampuilín, a diminutive form meaning something like "little church", a name recorded by Power in 1923. The diminutive suggests it was never a large or imposing structure, which may partly explain how thoroughly it has since disappeared.