What makes this site particularly striking is not the ruin itself but what lay just north of it: a burial ground for stillborn infants. These small, unconsecrated plots, sometimes called cilliní, were a feature of the Irish landscape for centuries, reflecting the Catholic practice of denying formal burial to unbaptised children. The church and its adjacent ground seem to have been forgotten even by the people who lived alongside them, which lends the whole place a quality of layered loss.

When Ordnance Survey officers passed through in 1839 and spoke to local inhabitants, they found that nobody could say much beyond the name. That name, however, turned out to be contentious. The OS Letters recorded it as Teampall Chlasi Shuibhlain, interpreted by the scholar Eugene O'Curry as meaning the Church of Shulawn's Trench, suggesting a personal name attached to some kind of earthwork or ditch. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, disagreed. He argued that the correct form was Teampall Killashoolan, meaning simply the Church of Killashoolan, and that O'Curry's reading introduced a reference to a trench that had no business being there. The kyle, as Carrigan called it using an older term for a small church or ecclesiastical enclosure, was already gone by his time, though its location remained known to local people. Whether O'Curry or Carrigan had the better of the argument, the dispute itself is a reminder of how much depends on the precise rendering of Irish place names, where a single misread syllable can conjure a trench out of nothing, or make one disappear.