The headstones go back to the early nineteenth century, the enclosing stone wall still holds its rectangular shape, roughly fifty metres north to south and thirty-five metres east to west, and the ground is still in use for burials. Yet where the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a church at the southern end, there is now no visible trace of it whatsoever, not even a scatter of dressed stone or a rise in the ground to suggest foundations beneath.

The church in question was the Church of Ireland parish church of Kilnamartery. Samuel Lewis, writing in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837, described it as a large handsome edifice with a square tower, built in 1808. That puts the building barely three decades old when the OS surveyors recorded it, which makes its complete disappearance from the surface all the more curious. What happened between 1842 and the present day to erase a substantial cut-stone church with a tower is not recorded here, but the pattern was not unusual in post-Famine Ireland, when Church of Ireland congregations in rural parishes shrank dramatically and many buildings fell into disrepair, were dismantled for their stone, or were simply abandoned. The graveyard, by contrast, continued to receive the dead and so continued to be maintained, which is likely why the enclosing wall survives in reasonable condition while nothing remains of the building it once served.