On a steep north-east-facing slope in County Waterford, dropping down towards a small north-south stream, there is a terrace where a church once stood and a holy well still sits below it. Nothing of the church is visible at ground level today, which gives the site an odd quality: the well persists, associated in local and ecclesiastical tradition with a sacred site, while the building that would have given that association its formal weight has all but dissolved back into the hillside.

When the antiquarian P. Power catalogued the ancient ruined churches of Waterford in 1896, he recorded that the terrace at Ballynevin still held a number of earthen mounds and architectural fragments, the kind of worked stone and disturbed ground that gesture towards a vanished structure. By the time of more recent inspection, even those traces had gone, leaving only the earthwork itself and the holy well below. Holy wells in Ireland were typically focal points for pre-Christian and early Christian devotion, often adopted into the ecclesiastical landscape by being placed in proximity to a church or oratory; the arrangement at Ballynevin, with the terrace directly overlooking the well, fits that pattern exactly, even if the church that completed it is no longer legible on the ground.

What remains is a landscape that asks the visitor to read absence rather than presence: the slope, the stream, the terrace, and the well are all still there, but the mounds and fragments that Power observed have since disappeared, leaving the site at the quieter end of what Irish ecclesiastical archaeology sometimes offers.