The footings, roughly a metre wide and no more than forty centimetres at their highest point, trace out a building that once measured around fourteen metres east to west and seven metres north to south. That outline, modest as it is, sits just below the crest of a north-south ridge between two valleys, and the views from the spot are wide and open in every direction. The church is tucked inside a roughly circular graveyard, a shape that tends to suggest considerable age, since early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures were more often circular or oval than the rectangular plots associated with later medieval and post-medieval practice.

The Irish name recorded for the site is Killavoogue, noted by the historian William Carrigan in 1905 in his substantial history of the Catholic diocese of Ossory. The kill element is the anglicised form of cill, the Irish word for a church or monastic cell, which appears in place names across the country wherever early Christian communities put down roots. Carrigan was drawing on the testimony of local Irish speakers still alive in his time, which gives the name a certain living weight; it was not merely a cartographic survival but something people actually used. Beyond the name and the outline of the walls, the historical record for this particular site is thin, and the stones themselves offer no dates.