Local field names have long preserved the memory: in Irish, "Shanakill," meaning the old church, and in English, "the Churchyard" and "the Church-field." The names outlasted the structures themselves, which have been quietly dissolving into the hillside for centuries.

The antiquarian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 and drawing also on unpublished manuscript notes, recorded two rectangular enclosures set parallel to one another on the slope, sharing a fence line as one of their sides. The northern enclosure, which Carrigan considered the more significant, measured roughly 42 metres north to south by 32 metres east to west, and retained a clearly defined rampart and fosse, the fosse being the external ditch that typically accompanies an earthen bank or rampart in early ecclesiastical enclosures of this type. Within it, a low mound suggested the collapsed remains of mud-walled structures. Against the eastern fence of this enclosure, the worn foundations of a small church, just 9 metres long and 5.3 metres wide, were still traceable. Immediately to the south lay a second, slightly smaller enclosure, its own bank and ditch less pronounced, containing further foundation traces that Carrigan speculated might belong to a monastic cell, a small monastery, or a priest's house. He noted that the spot commands an extensive view westward, a quality that, alongside the Irish place name, points to an origin in the earliest centuries of Christianity in Ireland, when such hilltop enclosures were chosen as much for their commanding aspect as for any practical consideration.

The monuments are no longer visible. Dense bramble growth now completely covers both enclosures, and the clearing that once gave some access to them is hemmed in by forestry. What Carrigan was able to observe and measure with reasonable precision in the early twentieth century has since been reclaimed by the hillside, leaving little for the eye to read on the ground.