It is one of those quietly unsettling arrangements that Irish rural history occasionally throws up, where the impulse to tidy away a ruin ends up preserving, in a peculiar way, the memory of what was lost.

The townland name Kyleballynamoe contains within it the Irish word cill, meaning a small church or early ecclesiastical cell, and the church it refers to was recorded in some detail by the historian William Carrigan in 1905. Writing from local knowledge and earlier sources, Carrigan placed the building on a slight rise of ground in what was then Mr. John Julian's land, roughly twenty yards west of the Nuenna river. By around 1830, the structure had been reduced to a single standing gable. Rather than leave it, whoever was responsible at the time demolished even that remnant and used the stone to fill a nearby spring well. The well already had a name that acknowledged the connection: Tubberkilleen, meaning the Well of the Little Church. A graveyard had surrounded the church, but Carrigan noted that scarcely a trace of it remained visible even in his own time. The spring well marked on Ordnance Survey maps in the northern part of the townland, sitting in the flat ground of the river's flood plain with the land rising sharply to its south, is likely the one he described. A buffer of roughly fifty metres around the well has been kept free of the tree plantation that otherwise lines the riverbank, which at least preserves the immediate setting from further enclosure.