The site, known as Templenakilla or Teampall na Cille, meaning the church of the graveyard, was once identifiable on the first edition Ordnance Survey map as a small church sitting at the junction of three field boundaries, with a burial ground enclosed along its southern side. Today, neither boundary nor burial ground survives above ground. Land improvement operations removed them, leaving pasture where there was once consecrated earth.

The burial ground served as a cillín, a type of unconsecrated or marginal ground used historically in Ireland for the interment of unbaptised children and others excluded from formal parish cemeteries. By the late nineteenth century this particular ground had already fallen out of use. Then, in 1990, the same land improvement works that had erased its surface accidentally confirmed what lay beneath. A spread of human bone, marine shells, and stone was uncovered near the south-western corner of the church. A second thin spread of shells, covering an area roughly four metres square, was found about sixteen metres further south. The presence of marine shells is a detail that recurs at a number of early Irish burial sites and is not yet fully understood, though it may relate to ritual or to the practical business of marking graves in soft ground.

The church and its vanished graveyard sit on the south-western side of the same ridge that carries the Eightercua stone row, a Bronze Age alignment of standing stones that is one of the more quietly remarkable prehistoric monuments on the peninsula. The proximity of early medieval ecclesiastical remains to a much older prehistoric monument is a pattern seen elsewhere in Ireland, where early Christian communities sometimes settled close to, or incorporated, older sacred landscapes. At Íochtar Cua, both layers of that history are present, though one now exists only in the soil.