No names are attached to them, no dates, no diocese. The church itself is little more than a memory in the landscape, and even that memory is uncertain, the site now understood to be a children's burial ground, or cillín, of the kind once used across Ireland for infants who died before baptism and so were excluded from consecrated ground. The overlap between these two functions, the site of a venerable church and a place of quiet, unofficial burial, is not unusual in Ireland, but it gives Flean More a particular atmosphere of accumulated loss.

The historical record is thin and tangled. Writing in 1837, Samuel Lewis noted in his Topographical Dictionary that within the parish of Glin, at Flean, in the mountains, there were the remains of a very ancient church, of which, he added plainly, the history is unknown. An earlier thread connects the area to a place called Bealachdroma or Ballaghdromar, mentioned in an inquisition of 1298 as belonging to the manor of Shanid and described as inhabited solely by Irish. The historian Begley, writing in the early twentieth century, suggested this referred to a large tract of land lying between Ballyhahill and Athea, and that it may correspond to the place later called Dromagarrum. Whether the church at Flean is directly related to that medieval reference remains uncertain; the site is catalogued as a possible church rather than a confirmed one, and the archaeology has not resolved the question.

Flean More sits in upland terrain in the parish of Glin, and the ground in this part of Limerick is not especially welcoming to the casual visitor. The children's burial ground, recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Record, is likely the physical location to look for. These cillíní are often marked by little more than a low earthen enclosure or a scattering of small, unmarked stones, easy to miss without some knowledge of what you are looking for. The three bishops of tradition leave no visible trace, and Lewis's very ancient church has left none either, at least none that has been formally identified. What remains is the tradition itself, lodged in the landscape and kept alive mainly in the notes of antiquarians.