No walls rise above the grass, no outline of masonry suggests itself between the headstones, and yet beneath the surface of a roughly triangular graveyard on a natural plateau, the footprint of an early Irish church lies undisturbed, its clay and mud walls long since dissolved back into the earth.

The site sits above the confluence of two rivers, elevated over the Coon river that runs along its base. The Irish name recorded for it, Cill a'Chuain, places it within the familiar pattern of early ecclesiastical foundations marked by the element "cill", the Irish word for a church or cell, often indicating a site of considerable age. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan described what little evidence remained, noting that the ancient church stood within an area of some 60 perches, roughly 300 metres in extent, and that its dimensions could still be approximately traced: around 45 feet from east to west and 18 feet from north to south, which works out at roughly 13.7 by 5.5 metres. That it was built from clay or mud rather than stone is itself telling. Mud-wall construction was common in early medieval Ireland, particularly for modest ecclesiastical buildings, but it leaves almost nothing behind. Where a stone church might survive as a ruin for centuries, a clay-walled structure simply weathers away, and what Carrigan found in 1905 were already only slight traces. The present chapel associated with the site stands about 200 metres to the south-west.

The graveyard itself remains in use and is the most tangible feature of the site today. The church beneath it has effectively returned to the plateau, visible only in the historical record and in the slight, imperceptible irregularities that sometimes betray a buried structure to those who know what they are looking for.