Today, none of that activity is visible above ground. The fields roll quietly on, but roughly 250 metres to the east, a medieval church, its associated graveyard, and a tower house, the kind of fortified residential structure common to late medieval Ireland, still mark the landscape and suggest where the vanished community once gathered.

The settlement's documentary trail begins in around 1315, when the Ormond Deeds record an Arnald le Poer granting 67 acres in Kilblethyn, as it was then spelled, to a John de Stanes and his wife Erneburga. By 1364, the place had the character of a small but organised vill: burgesses, the term for townspeople holding property under a borough tenure, were rendering 25 shillings per annum to the court, and named individuals such as John Redmond and William Burran each paid two shillings and sixpence for their respective burgages, a burgage being a plot of land held in exchange for rent and service. A chaplain named Henry Kepagh appears repeatedly in documents of 1364 and 1365, acquiring messuages, lands, tenements, and the rents owed by freeholders, suggesting he was a significant local figure in the management of property. Further transactions are recorded into 1369. The settlement's later history is largely one of confiscation and reassignment. In 1566, the lands belonged to Thomas Comerford of Ballymack, who lost them when he was attainted for rebellion. They passed through a succession of lessees, including James Prescott in 1577 and Francis Lovell in 1583, before being granted to Henry Comerford in 1586, the same year the Shortall family also appear as holders. The Cromwellian confiscations claimed the Shortall possessions in turn, and under the Restoration settlement the lands were granted to the Duke of York, with a Dudly Mannering recorded as occupying Kilbline from 1659. Each change of hands marks another stage in the slow process by which a once-active community became simply a parcel of land changing names on a deed.