At Cloonmore in County Tipperary, a roughly rectangular burial ground sits on a gentle rise among tillage and pastureland, and what it contains is largely absence. A medieval church once stood at its centre, but so little of it survives that the sole candidate for its remains is a fragment of wall in the south-west corner, heavily smothered in ivy, measuring around 3.3 metres long and 2 metres high. Whether that stub of masonry is genuinely the west gable of the medieval building or simply accumulated rubble is difficult to say with any certainty.

The story of what happened here involves at least three phases of building, each one cannibalising the last. By the time the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled in the early nineteenth century, the medieval church had already been reduced to the northern end of its west gable, and even that remnant had been pressed into service as the eastern wall of a small school house standing within the graveyard. The school house itself no longer exists, though it was recorded on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map. Meanwhile, a Protestant church was constructed around 1800 to the south of the old graveyard and at a slightly lower level, probably built in part from the stonework of the earlier church. The oldest legible gravestone in the old graveyard dates to 1780, which places the visible burial record firmly in the era when this recycling of earlier fabric was already well under way. The account of the medieval church's condition comes from O'Flanagan's 1930 compilation of the OS Letters, which recorded local topographic and historical observations gathered during the original survey of Ireland in the 1830s.