No stones, no wall, no visible break in the grass. The only clue that something lies beneath is a faint swelling of the earth, so subtle that a researcher named Hartnett, writing in 1939, could only describe it as a "barely perceptible raising of the ground at the spot."

The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an oval enclosure marked by a dotted line, measuring roughly 30 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and about 12 metres across. That cartographic convention, the dotted boundary, typically signals something already uncertain or ruinous at the time of survey. The field itself has long been called the "cill field", a name worth pausing over: "cill" derives from the Latin "cella" and in Irish placenames almost always points to an early ecclesiastical site or burial ground, often predating the arrival of formal church structures. The name, in other words, carried the memory of what the ground contained long after the ground itself had stopped showing it.