The building dedicated to St. Catherine, Virgin and Martyr, once stood on a south-westward slope in a river valley of County Kilkenny, roughly eighty metres east of a small meandering stream called the Craosóg. By the time Ordnance Survey mapmakers came through in 1839, it had already vanished so completely that they saw no trace worth marking. When a revised survey was carried out at the turn of the twentieth century, the silence on the map was unchanged. The church exists now only in historical memory, in a scatter of written references, and almost certainly beneath or beside the graveyard that still appears on early maps of the area.

The parish of Tullamaine, made up of the townlands of Tullamaine and Knockrea, was an ancient ecclesiastical unit that had been absorbed into the Rectory of Callan before the year 1300, suggesting its roots reach well back into the medieval period. The church was dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose feast falls on the 25th of November. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan described its former position with some care, noting that it stood on the slope of rising ground where the land falls away to the south-west, but he was clear that every vestige of the structure had by then disappeared. The OS Letters of 1839, compiled by surveyors working their way systematically across Ireland, recorded that there was at the site a large and much frequented burying ground, which suggests the place retained a living community significance long after the church itself had gone. The graveyard, it seems, outlasted the building it was meant to accompany.

The likely location of the church, now unverifiable above ground, falls within or immediately adjacent to the graveyard recorded on the earliest Ordnance Survey maps. That graveyard is the one tangible remnant of what was once a functioning parish, and the slow disappearance of the church itself, leaving not so much as a foundation course visible, is a quiet reminder of how thoroughly a building can be unmade when its stone is useful elsewhere and its congregation has moved on.