It is a confident label for something that has never convincingly been a church, or indeed much else. The site is, at its deepest, about three metres down, a natural-looking depression in the landscape that has prompted guesses, contradictions, and no firm conclusions for well over a century.

The confusion has deep roots. Local tradition held that this was a church site, hence the name on the maps. But the writer and Irish-language scholar known as An Seabhac classified it differently, calling it a ceallúnach, a term for a small, often informal burial ground associated with early Christian communities, sometimes used for unbaptised children or others who could not be buried in consecrated ground. Neither tradition is really supported by what you can actually see. When Browne, Armstrong, and Macalister examined the site in 1911, they noted a fragment of a building at the inner end of the hollow and raised the possibility that it might be the remains of a destroyed ringfort with a souterrain, an underground passage typically built during the early medieval period for storage or refuge. That interpretation has not been confirmed either. What is striking is how stable the site has been across time: in the early nineteenth century it was described as a hole roughly six feet deep and twelve feet in diameter, measurements that correspond closely to what surveyors found later. Something has sat here, largely unchanged, while theories about it have multiplied and cancelled each other out.