Not obscured by trees or walls, not reduced to a single gable end, but simply not visible at ground level, absorbed entirely back into the hill it once crowned. A drumlin, for those unfamiliar with the terrain of Ulster, is one of those smooth, rounded hills left behind by retreating glaciers, and County Cavan is thick with them. That a church should have been built on top of one, and then disappeared so completely into it, gives the site a quality that is less ruined than dissolved.

What makes the place stranger still is that it came close to never being here at all. According to the historian Davies, writing in 1948, it was recommended under Charles I that the church be relocated to Gortnakesh, where it would have been more convenient to the manor-house of Monyehall nearby. The suggestion was a practical one, the kind of administrative tidying-up that the plantation era in Ulster generated in abundance, as new landlords tried to organise parishes around their own estates. But it does not appear that anything came of the proposal, and the church stayed where it was, on its drumlin top in Annagelliff, until it fell out of use and into the earth.