The slight hollow is edged by a scatter of stones to the east and a low scarp to the west, cut across at its northern end by a field boundary. It is not much to look at, which is precisely what makes it interesting: the field itself carries the name Killalane, and that name may be the most eloquent thing about the place.

The question of what once stood here has two possible answers, and they are separated by several centuries. One possibility is that this is the remains of a Penal chapel, the kind of rudimentary structure, often built of mud and timber, that Catholic congregations erected during the eighteenth century when the Penal Laws restricted open religious practice. The other possibility reaches further back. A church called Killafeen, translated as the church of Aifín, was recorded in 1945 by the scholar Liam Price, who placed it near the eastern boundary of Laragh East townland, close to where a road from the east crossed the river on the approach to Glendalough. Price's description does not quite match this location, but it is possible his placement within the townland was simply wrong. The placename Killalane, attached to the field, may itself be a softened form of Killafeen, the two names having drifted toward one another over generations of local use. A bullaun stone, a type of boulder with a carved bowl-shaped hollow often associated with early ecclesiastical sites, was at some point moved from the nearby Gossan Stones, a standing stone pair about a kilometre to the north-east, and relocated to the grounds of Glendalough House. Its removal from the area tidied away one piece of evidence before anyone thought to ask what it might have meant.

The site sits in the Glenmacnass river valley, with the river itself about 180 metres to the south-west and Paddock Hill rising to the east. It is the kind of place that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance; the sunken outline is subtle, and without the local knowledge that the field is called Killalane, there would be little to pause for. Whether it sheltered a medieval congregation or a later one meeting quietly under penal conditions, or both in succession, remains genuinely unresolved.