What makes the site more than simply an old ruin is what excavations revealed beneath the ground: a significant proportion of those buried here were infants, pointing to the presence of a cillín, a children's burial ground where unbaptised babies and stillborn children were interred. In Irish tradition, those who died without baptism were excluded from consecrated ground, and so cilliní, usually informal and rarely documented, became the quiet repositories for lives that the formal Church would not acknowledge.

The church itself, known locally as the Old Church or St Munchin's Church, is reputedly founded by a woman named Rose, said to have been the sister of St Munchin, the patron saint of Limerick diocese. This places the site's origins in the early medieval period, before the Norman arrival in Ireland. It is recorded as a National Monument (No. 366), and the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the church standing in the eastern quadrant of its graveyard, with Kilrush Cottage immediately to its south. In 1980, ahead of housing construction on the site, Larry Walsh, then curator of Limerick Museum, directed excavations across six trenches in an effort to establish the graveyard's extent. Thirty-nine burials were uncovered, with thirty-seven of them concentrated in a single trench on the southern side of the church, close to what is recorded as the Quinlivan window. Of those burials, over forty per cent belonged to infants, and the evidence included what may have been a mother buried alongside her infant, as well as possible stillborn children, all consistent with post-medieval cillín use.

The ruins are accessible from Old Church Road and sit within the housing estate that was built around them following the 1980 excavation. The church walls remain in reasonable condition for a structure of this age, and the southern exterior, near where the infant burials were concentrated, is worth observing in that context. There are no formal visitor facilities, and the site rewards a quiet, unhurried look rather than a lengthy visit. Its ordinariness of setting, surrounded by suburban housing, is itself part of what makes the place quietly affecting.