Somewhere in a gentle south-to-north valley in County Waterford, a medieval parish church, its graveyard, and a holy well have all vanished below the surface of the ground. Not ruined in the usual sense, with tumbled gables and ivy-draped walls, but simply gone, absorbed into the fields as if the site had decided to keep its own counsel.

The church was already recorded as ruined in 1615, so its decline stretches back at least four centuries. By around 1840, when the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited as part of the Ordnance Survey's work in Waterford, even that ruined state was giving way to something more complete. He could still measure foundations: a nave roughly thirty feet by eighteen, a chancel of fourteen by thirteen feet, and a chancel arch, the narrow opening dividing nave from chancel in a small medieval church, standing about eight feet high and six and a half feet wide. The Reverend Patrick Power, writing in 1895, noted that this arch was rounded, a Romanesque form common in early Irish ecclesiastical building, and recorded a holy well in the vicinity. By the time anyone looked again with careful eyes, none of it remained visible at ground level. The graveyard, O'Donovan observed, had been cultivated over. A clearance cairn, a mound formed when stones are gathered and piled during agricultural clearance of a field, still sits on the site, and the surrounding fields may conceal the traces of a deserted settlement, suggesting that the church once served a community that also, in time, disappeared entirely.