The site, known as Baptistgrange and formerly called Achafad, sits on a natural east-west ridge to the north-west of the local church and graveyard, its northern edge falling away steeply and its southern flank dropping to exposed rock outcrops. Walk across the top of that ridge today and you would see only smooth pasture; any earthworks that once marked out streets, plots, or boundaries have been swallowed entirely, disguised, or perhaps simply worn away over centuries. The flatness of the ridge top, combined with the unnervingly straight line of its western edge, hints at human shaping, but the grass gives nothing away.

The place has a quietly significant medieval backstory. Baptistgrange was a grange, meaning an outlying agricultural estate managed by a religious house, in this case attached to St. John the Baptist's in Dublin, an Augustinian Hospitallers foundation also associated with the Fratres Cruciferi. The granges of such houses were working farms that supplied the mother institution with food and income, and this one was evidently substantial enough to retain its own church and settlement. After Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries swept through Ireland, the grange was leased in 1541 to the Countess of Ormond, passing from ecclesiastical to aristocratic hands in the manner common to monastic property across the country during that period. Somewhere in the centuries that followed, the settlement itself was abandoned. A motte, the earthen mound characteristic of early Norman fortification, once stood nearby on the north bank of the River Moyle at Allbert Bridge, but it was completely destroyed in the 1850s, removing yet another layer of the site's history from the landscape.

One fragment of the former settlement has survived, though in an odd, repurposed form. In a farmyard adjacent to the site, a sandstone chamfered window jamb complete with a glazing bar hole has been inserted into the door jamb of one of the outbuildings. It is the kind of detail that passes unnoticed until you know what you are looking at: a dressed stone from a medieval building, recycled into a working farm structure, carrying the ghost of an arched or mullioned window that no longer exists anywhere else.