Not into ruin, not into collapse, but into the ground itself, leaving behind only a faint swelling in the earth, roughly 22 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, that hints at what was once a circular enclosure surrounding it. The church itself registers on historical maps but not on the landscape as any visitor would now encounter it, which places Ballyvistea in an unusual category: a graveyard with a church that is, by all practical measures, invisible at ground level.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a recognisable feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where a roughly circular boundary, sometimes a raised bank or wall, defined the sacred precinct around a church and its associated burials. At Ballyvistea, that enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which dates from the mid-nineteenth century, meaning it was a legible feature of the landscape at that point. By the time the most recent edition was produced, it had been reduced to little more than a gentle rise in the ground, the sort of thing that registers only if you are looking for it, or know to look. The graveyard itself sits on a north-east-facing slope of a low rise, with open views in all directions, which is itself a quietly telling detail; such elevated, outward-facing positions were frequently chosen for early Christian sites, combining practical visibility with something less easy to quantify.