Nothing of that building remains above ground, yet two loose stones lying somewhere among the graves suggest it was ever there at all. These are pivot stones, and their presence, unremarkable to the casual eye, quietly marks the spot where a church door once swung open and shut for generations of parishioners.

Pivot stones are among the more overlooked survivors of medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture. Rather than hanging a door on iron hinges, early builders often used a system in which the door itself had a projecting pin at top and bottom; these pins rested in shallow cups or perforations cut into stone, allowing the door to rotate. The second of the two stones at Kilquane is broken, but it still preserves a small circular perforation just three centimetres in diameter, the precise socket into which one of those door pins would have sat. That a fragment this modest has survived, while the walls, roof, and every other dressed stone of the church have long since been robbed out or buried, is the kind of quiet irony these sites specialise in. The church itself is known as Cill Chuáin, meaning the church of Cuán, a dedication that roots the site in the early medieval period when individual saints lent their names to local foundations across the Dingle Peninsula.