There are no stones, no foundations, no visible earthworks to speak of, only a slight mound near the eastern shore of Lough Gur and a place-name that has been doing most of the argumentative work for over a century. The site appears on the revised 1927 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as "Killalough (Site of)", a designation borrowed not from physical evidence but from local memory, and even that memory turns out to be difficult to trust.

The name Killalough translates from the Irish as "church of the lake", which is evocative enough, but the etymology alone cannot confirm that a building ever stood here. The account that found its way onto the map originated with Lynch, writing in 1913, who recorded what an elderly local man had told him: that the church dated from the Desmond period, meaning the era of the Fitzgerald Earls of Desmond who dominated this part of Munster through much of the medieval period, and that it was known locally as the Round Church. The old man added that it had eventually been superseded by a newer church built by Rachel, Dowager Countess of Bath. A laneway called Bothairin na gCapall, meaning "the little road of the horses", was said to be the old approach road, and a section of it passing through an area called Rusheen, "the little wood", was still traceable at the time Lynch was writing. The problem is that the ground where the church supposedly stood was, during the medieval period, beneath the waters of Lough Gur itself, making it an unlikely location for any building. When the antiquary Thomas Dineley visited the adjacent Black Castle in the 1680s and sketched the surrounding area, he recorded no church at this location. By 1944, O'Kelly could only note that no trace survived and nothing was known of it.

The site sits near the causeway of the Black Castle on the eastern side of Lough Gur, north of the hill of Killalough. There is nothing to see in a conventional archaeological sense, but that is precisely what makes it worth understanding. The place is a useful study in how folklore, cartography, and wishful reading of a landscape can combine to mark something as real that may never have existed. If you walk the area, look for the tree that now serves as the only physical marker, and consider that Bothairin na gCapall, the old road, may still be partially legible in the landscape to the east of the hill.