' That phrase, recorded in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, suggests the building was already a ruin within living memory, its original purpose long dissolved. What remains today of the medieval church of St. Caoimhghin, also rendered as Coemhin or Kevin, in the townland of Abbotstown, is not much more than the surveyors saw: two partial walls rising from a high point within an oval graveyard, the ground dropping sharply away to the south.

The church takes its dedication from St. Kevin, most associated with Glendalough, though the cult of early Irish saints spread widely and this small parish church in the Castleknock area bore his name through the medieval period. The townland itself was recorded in earlier forms as Kylmekynyn, and appears on Rocque's 1760 map of Dublin beside a road linking Castleknock to Abbotstown, a route still legible on the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1837. By that date, the church was already shown within a smaller, rectangular graveyard, an earlier enclosure whose outline is still partly readable in the earthworks beneath the present boundary walls to the west and north. A 1547 inquisition cited by D'Alton in 1838 recorded that the tithes of Abbotstown belonged to the prebendary of Mullaghiddart, valued jointly with Damestown at eleven pounds and ten shillings annually, which gives some sense of the modest but functioning ecclesiastical economy this site once served.

What survives of the structure itself is worth examining closely. The north wall, measuring 7.6 metres long and standing to 2.5 metres, retains a door rebate at its western end, that is the recess into which a door frame was set, with a draw bar hole cut into the eastern jamb for securing the door from inside. Two splayed opes, window or door openings that widen inward to admit more light, are also visible, along with putlog holes, the small sockets left when timber scaffolding poles were removed during construction. South of the church, a stone-faced fosse, a roughly cut defensive or boundary ditch nearly five metres wide and over a metre and a half deep, defines the site's edge where the ground falls away. A holy well lies to the south-east of the graveyard. The site sits within what is now a managed graveyard, so access is generally straightforward, though the ruins themselves are fragmentary enough that knowing what to look for in the masonry makes the visit considerably more rewarding.