No stonework, no earthwork, no outline in the grass betrays its presence. The site is entirely invisible at ground level, yet the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, records it plainly as a Chapel in Ruins, meaning that even by that point it had already declined past the point of use. What survives today is essentially the memory of a memory.

The site is believed to have been a penal church, a category of informal or semi-clandestine Catholic worship space that emerged during the Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Catholic religious practice was suppressed under legislation that variously banned priests, outlawed Mass, and excluded Catholics from public life. Penal churches were rarely built to last; they were often rudimentary structures of timber or rough stone, erected quickly on marginal ground and easily dismantled or abandoned. That this one stood close to the River Suir, away from settlements, would be consistent with that pattern of deliberate obscurity. A related church site lies a short distance to the east, suggesting this part of Kilnaseer once held a modest concentration of religious activity, however fragile its physical traces have proved to be.