At Temple in Co. Mayo, a sub-rectangular walled enclosure of roughly fifty metres on each side contains a dense accumulation of burials, yet the Roman Catholic chapel that once stood at its northern end has vanished so completely that no trace of it remains above ground. The dead, in other words, have proved more durable than the building that once served them.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 recorded both the graveyard and the chapel clearly, the latter marked as an R.C. Chapel at the northern edge of the enclosure. At some point between that survey and the present, the structure disappeared entirely, leaving the walled burial ground to carry on without it. The earliest inscribed gravestone on the site dates only to the nineteenth century, though the density of burials suggests the ground may have been in use for considerably longer. The enclosure sits on a south-east-facing slope amid gently undulating pastureland, with a road running along its north-eastern edge. Roughly two hundred metres to the south-west lies a holy well, a separate site but a telling one; holy wells in Ireland were frequently associated with early ecclesiastical settlements, and their proximity to burial grounds often points to a pattern of sacred use stretching back well before any surviving stonework or inscription.