Most burial grounds follow the contours of a rectangle or follow the irregular logic of an older field boundary, but the enclosed ground on the southern slope of a hill at Killian, in County Galway, cuts a distinct triangular shape into the undulating grassland, bounded by a mortared stone wall and skirted on two sides by the county road. Inside it stand two separate ruined buildings, one largely collapsed, the other comparatively intact, and together they carry the memory of a place that local tradition once called a monastery.

The larger of the two structures is thought to have been a medieval parish church, a substantial building measuring more than 16.7 metres east to west and over 6.8 metres wide. Of it, only the southern wall survives to any meaningful height, standing about 3.5 metres, thick with ivy. A gap towards its western end most likely marks where a plain pointed arch doorway once stood, an opening recorded in nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey correspondence. A fragment of a single-light window survives near the eastern end of the same wall, though the east wall itself has been reduced to footings and the north and west walls have vanished entirely. At the western end of this ruin, a small overgrown rectangular enclosure may represent a later grave plot, partly built over the original fabric. The second building, closer to the west and better preserved, is thought to date from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. It retains a round-headed doorway in its western wall, opposing aumbries, which are small recessed cupboards set into church walls to hold liturgical vessels, in both the north and south walls, and a flat-headed window in the east wall, now blocked. Beneath that blocked window, a modern concrete altar-like construction supports a cross, and set into it is a coat of arms, possibly belonging to the Cheevers family of nearby Killian House. Members of that family are said to be buried inside, and a burial vault is built against the exterior of the northern wall.