At the top of a low oval hillock rising from flat pastureland in County Kildare, a shallow oblong depression in the ground marks where a church once stood. There is no masonry above the surface, no obvious ruin to frame a photograph. What remains is essentially a shaped absence, ringed by an old graveyard enclosed within a nineteenth-century stone wall, sitting on a natural glacial ridge that early communities appear to have found irresistible as a place to bury their dead and, eventually, to build.

The site is known as Killeencormac, a name that reaches back to a local tribal grouping called the Uí Cormaic, descendants of one Cormac Caech, who held territory in this part of Kildare. The scholar Shearman, writing in 1873, read the placename as Cill-Fine-Cormaic, meaning roughly the church of the tribes of the Uí Cormaic. The hillock itself is a glacial esker, a long ridge deposited by meltwater beneath an ice sheet, and by 1860 it was already being described in careful detail: oval in circumference, its western end fashioned into a low mound with the traces of three terraces cut into its sides, the entire enclosed area occupied by graves, and at the summit that telling hollow where a structure had once stood. Scattered large stones confirmed something had been built there. Excavations carried out in 1929 by Macalister and Praeger recovered a fragment of carved slab bearing part of a plain Latin cross in high relief, and, more remarkably, a small granite gable-finial of what they called the butterfly type, just five inches across, found during trenching along the north side of the mound. A gable-finial is a decorative or structural stone placed at the apex of a roof gable, and this particular form is associated with early Irish oratories. The excavators concluded it was about as close to proof as the evidence would allow that a small oratory had once stood within the enclosure, probably during the eighth or ninth century.

The site lies in level pasture drained by the River Greese, with Colbinstown Castle roughly 580 metres to the north-east. The graveyard remains enclosed by its nineteenth-century wall, accessible through a gate at the north-north-west. The terracing on the mound's south-western side, noted in 1860, is still said to be traceable, and the depression at the summit, modest as it is, rewards a slow walk to the top.