That gentle arc in the road could, archaeologists suggest, follow the northern edge of an ancient ecclesiastical enclosure, the roughly circular boundary that once defined a sacred settlement. There is no church to see, no graveyard, no visible trace at ground level of anything at all. The site is, in the most literal sense, a place defined by absence.

What was here, until road construction removed it, was a church dedicated to St. Braghan, the figure from whom the place takes its name, "kil" being the Irish word for church or cell. Writing in 1883, Holahan recorded that local people could still point out the graveyard's location in a field to the left as one approaches from Graigue, and that earlier in the nineteenth century, when that field was tilled, portions of coffins and human bones had been turned up by the plough. St. Braghan's feast day is recorded in the Martyrology of Donegal, a seventeenth-century catalogue of Irish saints, on the 17th of September. By the time William Carrigan wrote about the site in 1905, he was more emphatic about what had been lost: the church had been thrown down and the graveyard destroyed during the construction of the public road, at the exact point where it branches off towards Graigue. Carrigan also noted a local tradition that a monastery had once stood here, which, if true, would suggest a settlement of some scale and age rather than a simple rural chapel.