The roughly rectangular enclosure at Ballinaltig sits on the west side of a road in County Cork, its northern half crowded with gravestones dating mostly from the 1800s, its southern half sloping away with far fewer markers. Unremarkable on the surface, perhaps, until you notice that the arc of earthen bank forming the southern boundary, standing some two and a half metres in external height, actually follows the line of a large, levelled circular enclosure that only aerial photography has made legible. The graveyard, in other words, has been quietly occupying the ghost of something far older.

Beneath the northern half of the site once stood the parish church of Kilshanahan, though nothing of it is visible today. A 1935 Ordnance Survey map still marked the spot as a church site, but by then the building had been a ruin for well over two centuries. A 1700 account, quoted by Brady in 1863, described it plainly: a very small church built of stone and clay, altogether ruinous, with only the west end still standing, covered in ivy. That end has since vanished entirely. What has survived, set into the east wall of the graveyard, is a bullán stone, a type of worked stone featuring a bowl-shaped hollow that is associated throughout Ireland with early ecclesiastical sites and whose original function remains a matter of some debate, ranging from liturgical use to grain-grinding. This particular example measures roughly 42 centimetres by 28 centimetres, with a hollow about 20 centimetres in diameter. Elsewhere in the southern half of the graveyard, a sandstone block may represent the head of a round-arched window light from the vanished church, though its identification is not certain.