To an untrained eye it reads as little more than a grassy irregularity in the ground, but beneath that turf lies a rectangular stone-built structure, roughly 3.9 metres east to west and 2.6 metres north to south, with a low accumulation of stone and mortar still visible inside. It is a modest footprint, closer in scale to a small room than a grand ecclesiastical building, yet its setting within a burial ground strongly suggests something sacred once stood here.

A 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels this spot, or somewhere very close to it, as "Shanakill (site of)", a name worth unpacking. Shanakill derives from the Irish "Seanchill", meaning old church, a placename that in Ireland typically marks the location of an early medieval ecclesiastical site, often one that had already fallen out of use long before it was ever formally recorded. The designation "site of" on the 1938 map indicates that even by then nothing substantial was visible above ground, suggesting the structure had been in ruin for a considerable period. Whether the sod-covered remains now visible are the remnant of that old church, or of some other building within the same enclosure, has not been firmly established.