What makes the site quietly unsettling is its past: in the 18th century, human bones were reportedly unearthed here in large quantities, the kind of discovery that tends to linger in local memory and eventually find its way into antiquarian writing, which is precisely how the detail survived.

The place is known as Kilboy, and its Irish name carries its own layer of interest. A scholar named Ronan, writing in 1928, identified it with a church called Cill Buidhe, meaning 'Yellow Church', and noted that it stood on 'an ancient rath'. A rath is a ringfort, the circular enclosure type used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, and the earthwork that survives at Kilboy may well be a remnant of exactly that. The enclosure measures roughly 30 metres in diameter, defined by a bank of earth and stone around 3 metres wide. On the southern side, the bank incorporates external drystone facing and has been absorbed into the fabric of an existing lane, which suggests it has been in continuous use, in some form, for a very long time. There is no sign of an external fosse, the ditch that typically runs around the outside of a rath, and no internal features are apparent. O'Flanagan, also writing in 1928, is the source for the account of the bone finds, suggesting that by the early 20th century the site had already acquired a reputation that attracted antiquarian attention, even if the physical remains had long since ceased to be legible at the surface.