At Ventry, on the south-west tip of the Dingle Peninsula, the process is essentially complete. The graveyard remains, and so does the sense that something substantial once stood at its eastern end, where a slight raised platform in the ground hints at buried foundations. But the walls, the doorways, the window of cut brown sandstone, all of it that John O'Donovan measured and sketched in 1841, is gone now, swallowed gradually by wind-driven sand and coastal erosion over the intervening two centuries. What makes this place quietly strange is not dramatic collapse but a slow, almost polite erasure.

The church, also known as Teampall Fionntrá or Teampall Chaitlíona, was already a going concern by the early fourteenth century, appearing in the Papal Taxation list of 1302 to 1307 for the diocese of Ardfert. By 1398 it had become the subject of a canonical dispute, with a priest named Patrick Treawnt accused of unlawfully detaining it. The church survived that controversy and continued in use through the medieval period; in 1633 it was recorded under the patronage of Maurice Trant. By 1756, however, it was in ruins. When O'Donovan visited in 1841, he found a rectangular structure running roughly nineteen metres east to west and seven metres wide, its walls of small rough stone still standing about three metres high in places. On the north wall he noted a semicircular-headed doorway, nearly choked with sand, and beside it a narrow pointed window. A doorway in the south wall, once placed opposite the northern one, had already fallen. Even then, the sea and the sand were winning. O'Donovan could not measure the full height of the doorway because the sand had risen too far. Around 1917, an octagonal stone font and its pedestal were dug from the graveyard and moved to the modern parish church, where they remain in use.

A survey of the graveyard carried out by Laurence Dunne in 2010 identified seventeen architectural fragments from the medieval building, most of them pressed into service as headstones by later generations. Among them were water spouts, weather coping flags, a probable door hinge-stone, and chamfered jamb fragments, the dressed sandstone of a church repurposed, piece by piece, as grave markers. The raised ground at the eastern end of the graveyard is worth a look, if only to consider what it covers.