On a south-facing valley slope in County Kilkenny, somewhere beside the old road from Clontubbrid chapel to Garranamanagh, a church and its burying ground once stood and then vanished so completely that no physical trace remains at ground level, and no one alive retains any memory of them.

The 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a small rectangular enclosure on the north side of the road, measuring roughly 17 metres by 11 metres, sitting just inside the townland of Clontubbrid and immediately east of the Tifeaghna boundary. The surveyors' letters from that same year described it as a small obsolete burying ground, already covered in furze and known locally as Cill Sheiffin, the church of Sheffin. By that point the church itself had already disappeared, obliterated, in the words of the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, long before anyone then living could remember. The graveyard had continued in use for one purpose only: the burial of unbaptised children, a common informal practice in rural Ireland, where infants who died before baptism were excluded from consecrated ground and interred instead in liminal spaces, old ecclesiastical sites among them. Around 1850, the graveyard too was levelled, with Carrigan noting that every vestige was removed as completely as if a human interment had never taken place there. It is a striking phrase, and an accurate one. There is now no local recollection of the site at all.