The hollow sits in a graveyard, beside a medieval church, on a hilltop in County Tipperary, and it was used as a handball alley. The caretaker recalled his father playing there in the 1930s and 40s, which means that within living memory, a feature carved out of consecrated ground beside an ancient place of worship was doubling as a rural sports court.

The graveyard itself occupies the south-western edge of the hill summit, running roughly 83 metres east to west and 38 metres north to south, its surface undulating in the way that old burial grounds often do when centuries of interments have quietly shifted the earth. At the western end stands the Romanesque church, a style of architecture characterised by rounded arches and solid stone construction that was common in Ireland between roughly the tenth and twelfth centuries. Immediately to the south-east of it, traces of a second church survive. To the north, in the adjoining field, there are earthworks of a separate character altogether. The concentration of features here, two churches, associated earthworks, and a graveyard on a commanding hilltop, points to a site that accumulated significance over a long period rather than being established all at once.

The handball hollow is the detail that lingers. Stone revetment, which here means a facing of stonework used to stabilise the steep cut sides, suggests some deliberate shaping of the space beyond rough quarrying alone. Whether that shaping was originally done with the game in mind, or whether the hollow existed first for some other purpose and was later pressed into service, is not recorded. What is clear is that the boundary between the sacred and the everyday was, at least for a few decades in the mid-twentieth century, rather loosely observed at Donaghmore.