At Colman in County Tipperary, a sub-rectangular enclosure of roughly 50 metres by 46 metres sits on a gentle east-facing slope in undulating pasture, its low earthen and stone bank barely knee-high, and somewhere beneath the grass lie the dead of a community that left no legible markers above ground. The church that once stood roughly at its centre, oriented east to west in the traditional Christian manner, is equally absent from the visible landscape in any standing form. What remains is the shape of things: a boundary, a slope, and the faint geometry of a place that was once in use.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of a systematic effort to document placenames and local knowledge across Ireland, noted plainly that the graveyard was deserted. This observation was later published by O'Flanagan in 1930. By that point the site had already receded into the pasture, its function ended and its markers gone or sunk. The enclosing bank, which measures about two metres in overall width and stands somewhat lower on the exterior than the interior, is the kind of boundary feature typical of early ecclesiastical sites, where a raised earthwork defined sacred ground from the surrounding landscape. The east quadrant of this bank has been reduced further to a simple scarp. Adding to the complexity of the immediate area, there are earthworks to the east and south-east, a small enclosure directly to the north, and another enclosure approximately 30 metres further north, suggesting a cluster of activity around this site that extends beyond the graveyard itself.