The church that gave the place its name is gone. The burial ground that once accompanied it has vanished too. What remains is an enclosure edged with old thorns and elder trees, a neglected well near its north-eastern corner, and the upper stone of a small broken quern lying somewhere close by. A quern is a hand-turned grinding stone, the kind used for milling grain at a domestic scale, and finding one near a sacred site is not unusual; such objects turn up in ritual contexts across early medieval Ireland. What is unusual here is the stubbornness of the place itself, the fact that generation after generation left this particular triangle of land alone.

Writing in 1928, a scholar named Ronan recorded the site under its older placename, Kilmanoge, which he identified as a corruption of Kill-na-mban-og, meaning the Church of the Virgins. The name points to an early ecclesiastical foundation, possibly a community of religious women, though the physical evidence of any such establishment has long since disappeared from the surface. What Ronan found, and what he thought worth recording, was not a ruin but an absence: cultivated land on all sides, and this one enclosure held apart, tended only by its own elderness. The well near the north-eastern angle appears on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five inch map, which gives it at least a degree of cartographic solidity even if its sacred status remains a matter of tradition rather than certain record.