At Carrigatemple in Oldcourt, County Cork, the official record of a former church amounts to a single cautious sentence: the place is 'reputed' to have once held a religious building, and there is no visible surface trace of it remaining.

The name itself is the most substantial evidence. Carrigatemple combines the Irish words for rock and church, a compound that turns up across Ireland wherever a place of worship once marked the landscape. Writing in 1902, a researcher named Jones noted the tradition attaching to this spot, though even then the language was hedged with caution. 'Reputed' is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Whatever stood here, if anything did, had left no physical impression by the early twentieth century, and none has emerged since. The ground holds its silence.