At this ruined medieval church in Moyne, County Mayo, that is precisely what happened. Whoever extended or repaired the foundation plinth here deliberately incorporated one into the upper course on the west side, raising the question of whether it was a practical act of reuse or something more deliberate. It is the kind of detail that suggests the site had a longer and more layered history than its surviving walls alone can tell.

The church itself is a modest rectangular structure, roughly eighteen metres east to west and eight metres north to south, built from local limestone in what is described as the native Irish tradition, meaning it follows the plain, unadorned style of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture rather than the more elaborate Romanesque or Gothic modes imported from continental Europe. It may date to the twelfth century, though the fabric is difficult to pin down precisely. The south wall still stands to a height of four and a half metres, and most of the east gable survives, though the head of a tall narrow window there has collapsed. A doorway in the south wall is particularly interesting: bluntly pointed and chamfered on the outside, it has a flat segmental arch on the inside beneath a pointed relieving arch, and retains a draw-bar hole in the east jamb, the slot into which a timber bar would have been slid to secure the door from within. An excavation carried out in 1988 established that this doorway originated in the fourteenth century and was then modified sometime in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, pointing to continued use and adaptation across several generations. The same excavation identified two distinct phases in the foundation plinth, confirming that the building was not simply raised and abandoned but was actively maintained and altered over time.