There is nothing to see at ground level, no stone, no earthwork, no outline in the grass. The site is recorded purely on the basis of the word "cill", a term in Irish denoting a small early Christian church or cell, often a modest enclosure associated with a local saint or monastic community. That a name survives where nothing else does is, in its own quiet way, the whole story.

The word "cill" appears in countless Irish townland and field names, and its presence is generally taken by scholars as a reliable indicator that ecclesiastical activity of some kind once occurred nearby, even when all physical evidence has long since vanished. At Fountainstown, the identification rests on this linguistic trace alone, recorded by researchers at University College Cork. The site sits on an east-facing slope, a common orientation for early medieval religious sites, where a church would have faced toward the rising sun during morning prayer. Whether any structure here was built in timber, in drystone, or in mortared masonry, and when it fell out of use, remains unknown. The land has been pasture for long enough that the surface carries no visible trace whatsoever.