The nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey recorded a roughly circular pattern of fields, approximately 120 metres across, which is the characteristic shape of an early Irish monastic or ecclesiastical enclosure, a cill, the roughly circular boundary that defined the sacred space of an early Christian settlement. Tucked into the south-eastern quadrant of that circle sat something more quietly poignant: a children's burial ground, of the kind known in Irish as a cillín, a place where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were laid to rest, often in the margins of much older sacred sites.

The place-name itself offers the most evocative clue to what once stood here. O'Donoghue, writing in 1986, translated Kilboultragh as Cill Boultragh, meaning the church of the mud mortar or mud mixture. That detail points to a building technique common in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture, where clay or mud-based mortar was used rather than lime-based mortars that came into wider use later. A church identified by its construction material is unusual, and suggests the name was fixed at a time when the building was still visible and distinctive enough to carry that description into local memory. By the time the Ordnance Survey returned to map the area in 1903, the circular field pattern that had preserved the enclosure's outline in 1842 had already changed, the landscape quietly rearranging itself around a boundary that had long since lost its original purpose.