The trough sits atop a slight, roughly circular rise of around eighteen metres in diameter near the north-west corner of a field, and this modest hump in the grass is the most plausible candidate for the location of Kiltankin Church. Nothing else is visible above ground. No walls, no foundation stones, no obvious disturbance in the soil. The building has vanished so completely that whatever once stood here now exists only as a gentle swelling underfoot, and a water trough for cattle.

By the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1840, the church was already gone, or at least gone enough that the cartographers recorded it simply as the "site of Kiltankin Church". That early OS mapping, a remarkably systematic survey of Ireland carried out in the 1830s, marked the graveyard associated with the church with a small, roughly oval dashed outline, suggesting the burial ground's extent was still known and recognisable at the time, even if the church itself had long since fallen. The place-name Kiltankin preserves something older still; "kil" derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, a prefix that appears across hundreds of Irish townland names and almost always signals an early ecclesiastical presence, often pre-Norman in origin.