No walls, no earthworks, no crop marks visible from the air; just the placename, preserved in local usage long after whatever it once described had disappeared entirely from the landscape.

The evidence, such as it is, comes from two local historians writing in the early twentieth century. William Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that the field south of the churchyard was called "the Old Street", and took that as sufficient grounds to identify it as the site of an ancient village. O'Kelly, citing the same area, recorded a cluster of related field names: Sean-bhaile, meaning old town or old settlement in Irish, along with "Old Street" and "Old Court", each of them pointing to a hamlet that had once occupied the ground. The site lies in a river valley east of the Craosóg, a small meandering stream, and the church and graveyard it once served still stand to the north. A road running between Callan and Kilkenny passes roughly forty metres south of the graveyard, and it is not entirely clear whether the fields in question lie north or south of it, which complicates any attempt to pin down exactly where the settlement stood. Satellite imagery, at least as recently examined, shows nothing on the ground that would settle the question.

What survives, then, is essentially a ghost written in field names. The Irish placename tradition has a long history of preserving the memory of vanished settlements in exactly this way, long after physical traces have been ploughed out or simply weathered away. At Tullamaine, the names outlasted everything else.