The old church at Ballyclogh, in the demesne of Ballyclogh House in north Cork, offers none of that. When the antiquarian Power examined the site in 1932, he found no trace of a boundary fence and no sign of interments anywhere in or around the building. The walls, roughly coursed and averaging only about sixty centimetres in height, have been swallowed by trees and overgrown to the point where the structure barely announces itself. Only the centre of the north wall reaches anything close to a readable height, at around 1.6 metres. The interior is strewn with loose stone.

The building itself is a modest rectangle, measuring roughly 11.5 metres east to west and 6.3 metres north to south, the kind of proportions typical of a simple early or medieval Irish parish church. What makes it harder to place is precisely the absence of the usual markers of parish life. Power concluded that it had functioned in a quasi-parochial capacity, serving what he described as a disjointed portion of Glanworth parish, a detached fragment of territory for which this building sat at the centre. Such irregular parish geographies were not uncommon in Ireland, where the boundaries of civil and ecclesiastical divisions could drift apart over centuries, leaving outlying communities attached to distant parishes in ways that made little obvious geographical sense. A small local church, without a full parochial identity but fulfilling something of that role, would have answered a practical need in such a situation.