The old church at Straid in County Galway had already fallen into disrepair by the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps was produced in the nineteenth century. The cartographers dutifully drew a rectangular roofed building, roughly eighteen metres by five, aligned on an east-north-east to west-south-west axis in the manner typical of Christian ecclesiastical structures, and then labelled it, with some candour, as being in ruins. By the third edition of those same maps, issued around 1930, even that outline had been replaced by the phrase "Site of". Nothing visible now remains above ground.

The building sat centrally within a rectilinear graveyard, and that graveyard is the only physical frame that survives to suggest something once stood here at all. Rectilinear graveyards of this kind are often associated with early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures, though nothing in what is known about this particular site allows a confident date to be attached. What the maps record, read in sequence, is a slow erasure: roofed ruin, then footprint, then absence. The church was apparently demolished sometime between the first and third Ordnance Survey editions, leaving the graveyard to persist around a vacancy.