That detail alone gives a sense of how layered and unselfconscious this site is. The ruined church at Ballyhomuck sits on a low rise of open grassland in County Tipperary, with clear views in every direction, inside a rectangular graveyard that is still in use.

The church has a complicated identity. It appears in the Ecclesiastical Taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302 as Cloneen or Clonynger, valued at 40 shillings, and has been identified by scholars with an earlier foundation called Kilburry, or Cill Bhearaigh, meaning the church of a saint named Bearach. By 1640 it was functioning as a vicarage under the Bishopric of Cashel, with a small glebe, a landholding attached to support a clergyman, of just two arable acres worth five shillings a year. The Civil Survey of 1654 records a Richard Bermingham as proprietor of the surrounding 109 acres at Ballyhomuck, and the same survey hints that the place was once more than an isolated church, referring to a small 'towne' clustered around it. A memorial slab in the north-east corner of the chancel is dedicated to Richard Bermingham, who died in 1672 and was noted in 1640 as an Irish papist, which makes his commemoration inside an Anglican vicarage something worth pausing over. The church itself is built from coursed limestone rubble and comprises a nave and chancel; most of the south wall of the nave survives to full height, which is enough to reveal some intriguing structural evidence. Drain holes and a string course near the top of that wall suggest the roof was carried below the wallhead, with a wall-walk running above it. Beam holes in the jambs of the chancel arch show where a rood screen once stood, a wooden partition that would have separated the clergy's chancel from the lay congregation in the nave. A two-light window in the ivy-covered east gable is barely distinguishable, and a single-light lancet in the south wall of the nave has been blocked up at some point, its counterpart in the north wall surviving only as a partial embrasure.

The floriated graveslab recovered from the nave wall, decorated with carved plant motifs in the medieval manner, now sits in the graveyard rather than the wall it was mortared into. It is the kind of object that rewards a slow look, and the kind of reuse that quietly says something about how the living have always improvised around the dead.