In a field roughly 70 metres south-west of a graveyard in Ballynoe, a curving boundary hedge follows an arc that has nothing to do with modern land division. Continue south-eastward and that curve persists as a faint difference in how the grass grows, the ghost of a filled-in ditch pressing up through differential vegetation. What these traces describe, taken together, is an Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure of approximately 200 metres in diameter, one that most people driving through this part of west Limerick would pass without a second glance.

The monastery at Clonelty, as it was known, appears to have been a multi-vallate enclosure, meaning it was ringed by several concentric boundaries rather than a single wall or bank. A record preserved in the National Folklore Collection at UCD captures this precisely in the words of local tradition: adjacent to the church, one account runs, is an ancient fort, thickly hedged all round, and that fort is surrounded by another bigger one, and that by still another larger one. At the centre of all this sits a small Romanesque church whose main fabric and west doorway date from the eleventh or twelfth century, making it pre-Norman in origin. Romanesque here refers to the round-arched, thick-walled style that preceded the pointed arches of Gothic architecture, and which arrived in Ireland in the decades before the Anglo-Norman invasion. The church may have been dedicated to St. Íde of Killeedy, a seventh-century saint of considerable local significance, though the place-name itself tells a different story: a Limerick Ordnance Survey letter of 1840 traces Clonelty to the Irish words for a meadow or bog island and a doe, with no ecclesiastical meaning at all. The building was later adapted for Protestant use after the Reformation and, as the same 1840 description notes, was never divided into nave and choir, measuring just over ten metres long and six metres wide inside.

The site lies in the townland of Ballynoe, about three and a half miles west of Ballingarry. The most legible physical remains are in the northern quadrant of the graveyard, where the ruined church walls still stand. The enclosure itself requires patience; surface traces are absent along much of the south-west, west, north, and east-north-east circuit, and what survives is best appreciated from aerial imagery rather than on foot. A visit in early spring, before the vegetation thickens, gives the best chance of reading the curving field boundaries for what they are.