On a north-south ridge in County Waterford, a stretch of ordinary farmland conceals something that most people passing through would never suspect: a vanished church and its burial ground, reduced now to faint humps in a pasture field and the unsettling memory of bones turning up during building work in a nearby farmyard.

The church at Killowen was noted, in a survey of the Protestant diocese of Waterford compiled in 1615, as being "in good repair", which suggests it was still a functioning place of worship at that point. Sometime after that, it disappeared from the landscape entirely. By 1840, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, the location was already being marked as the "Site of Killowen Graveyard", the church itself gone and the burial ground reduced to a place-name rather than a living institution. What survives on the ground today amounts to slight scarps, gentle surface irregularities that hint at a roughly rectangular enclosure measuring approximately 40 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south. This sits around 30 metres to the north-east of a nearby rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, built as a defended farmstead. The proximity of church site to rath is a pattern that appears repeatedly across the Irish countryside, the two types of monument often occupying the same quietly elevated ground. The human dimension is harder to overlook: bones encountered during farmyard construction about 20 metres to the west confirm that the burial ground was once more extensive than even its faint surface traces suggest.